Fill Heaven with Laughter
It's never easy to say goodbye.
It’s been a heavy year.
Honestly, it’s been a beautiful and heavy year.
Today, though? Today is difficult. Today, loved ones will gather to bid farewell to a man that is gone too soon.
The tears flow so easily. They come in waves and my breath catches. It’s everything I have in me to remember to breathe and to focus on something wonderful, anything to make the tears stop.
But the tears and heavy emotions aren’t always a bad thing, are they?
So, if you’d allow me the honor, I’d like to tell you about him. The one that Heaven welcomed home last month.
I called him Uncle but he went by many names: Son, Brother, Father, Husband, Friend.
He had a wicked sense of humor and a smile that could, and often did, light up every room. There was a penchant for hockey, baseball, and golfing. We are a family of athletes, and he was no exception.
My first two memories of Uncle are actually years apart in occurrence, but tied together in my childhood heart. I remember being held in the kitchen, his laughter filling the space around me as I held his hair and laughed along with him, tears from some childhood antic gone awry dried on my cheeks. And then we’re playing Zelda in the family room and his same boisterous laugh is once again filling the air as I failed miserably at Zelda and kept trying over and over and over again.
Years later I would tell him that I finally beat Zelda thanks to the cheat codes I found on the internet.
He would sneak me extra servings of ribs during family BBQs and talked to me about my round after golf tournaments. The art piece he made for the family White Elephant party scared me as a little girl, and he never let me forget it.
He was a constant for us all. Quietly observing until he just couldn’t, and then the show was his to own.
The stories he told about growing up were fractured with Oh but then… moments that took us into a new story and eventually everything and nothing was wrapped up.
My life fell apart and he was there, helping to carry me through the fire. If my dad was my first hero, Uncle was a close second.
I’ll miss him calling me kiddo. I’ll miss his laugh and his hugs. I’ll miss how safe and protected he always made me feel. How loved I knew I was by him.
I pray that he knows how much I loved him. Love him, since the love never fades away.
Life doesn’t always feel fair, and I’ll never not be sorry that our time was cut too short. I can’t stop thinking about my own mortality, and yet I know that when it’s my time we’ll all be together again.
My heart is broken from so much loss this year, but it’s also been patched up by the love that I’ve been blessed to call my own.
If we allow it to be, things are strongest where they’re broken.
I’m sad and happy and angry and content and exhausted and grieving.
It’s very heavy right now.
These tears won’t last forever, but these memories will last a lifetime.
But, Uncle, if you were here I would hug you and say Thank you for loving me. I love you so much. Fill Heaven up with your laugh, and we’ll see you when we get to go Home.
See you soon.