April 7, 1955

My first husband would have turned 60 today if he were still alive. I thought of this on my drive to work this morning. 60. Wow. Joe and I would have been married 35 years this year if I hadn’t gotten the hell out of Dodge. I thought I would write about him on his birthday. On my lunch hour today I wrote four sad paragraphs and with the cursor at the end of the fourth paragraph, I put my finger on the backspace key and watched the letters disappear one by one.

That was easy to do. But I can’t delete that part of my life, nor would I want to. That union gave me the greatest gift of my life. My son. And though we were never meant to stay long in the journey that was Joe’s life, we were meant to pass through it. We were meant to step up onto the stage and have staring roles. We were in the second act, but by the third we were gone. We were meant to leave and find our own path, or journey, or a stage that only had room for two. It starred a young mother and her son.

There has been and will continue to be a lot of living between then and now, but that was our beginning. It was the beginning of life for me as an adult and it was the beginning of life itself for a baby boy. And so I honor that part today with this small mention, and a happy birthday, and a hope for continued restful peace.