Waving to Butterflies

Remembering Barbara

            Barbara this was the fourth Easter in over fifty five years that I will not be with you. I was driving home from church a few months after you passed and I saw a monarch butterfly coming towards the car. I started to weep as I waved to the butterfly. Was it you? 

            I was teaching a class on the importance of communication and using the movie “Patch Adams” as a way to communicate with the students. A butterfly lands on him, when he asks for a sign, when he is thinking about his GESUNDEIT INSTIUTE.  

For our marriage ceremony we selected an aria from Puccini's Madama Butterfly:  Un bel di vedremo." "One fine day".  Chio Chio San is singing of her belief that Pinkerton will return for his Japanese wife after being away for three years. 

            We had been married for five or six years, and were living in our house in Harvard, Massachusetts when you had your first bout with MS. You regained most of your abilities and were able to return to work. We then moved to a two family house in Arlington, where everything you needed was on one level. Since I couldn't fix you, I wonder if I was so involved with fixing your environment that I lost track of the love I had for you. 

              I think back to when you had been confined to bed for five or six years and I wanted to learn to give you a back rub. That weekend seminar started my career as a massage therapist.  It is ironic that you were my teacher for being a care-giver and that I was never able to give you a massage because you had been immobile for too long. I do have a skill which I wish I had been able to share with you.

            In 2004 when you were in the ICU with an infection and I was in London with my chorus, I could feel you with me. "Love could I only tell thee" , "I dreamed a dream" and "Y Darlun" were especially difficult for me to sing. Washington Irving wrote:  There is sacredness in tears.

                            They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.

                            They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues.

                            They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, 

                            of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.

            Forty seven years was a long marriage and we had difficult times which we handled together. 

            BAMBISAN, I still wave to butterflies.          Rarn