Junebug would be afraid for many years of people disappearing. When you go to bed and wake up and the biggest love of your six years and eight months of life is gone, this fear makes sense.. or so I thought.

When I met Jay, the next biggest love of my life, he quickly learned about my fear of something happening to him. He always knew to pick up the phone when I called. "Hey Babe" he would say until he said it no more. It's hard to believe my biggest fear happened and that I survived because longer than my almost seventeen year marriage to Jay, I had lived with this fear and others.

As I check to see if I am really still breathing and find I am, I wonder if there is more to my fears than I am seeing. Maybe what I think I am afraid of is not really what it seems? I decided to listen a little closer and imagined I was kneeling and what I heard whispered into my ear was "I am afraid to disappear."

It makes sense why Junebug became so afraid to disappear again. It's lonely and scary when you lose someone who knew you and loved you in a way that reflected back to you parts of yourself that were lost to your own eyes. A piece of grief is losing this knowing another had of you in the world. It feels like looking into a clear glass pond and being unable to see your reflection but the secret I think to finding it again is understanding that this knowing can still exist even without the person who gave you this most precious gift.

So Junebug, you have to trust me, your reflection is there. It always has been and I am helping us find it. It doesn't go away because a person does or even when you do. Imagine when we find it and you can see it was there all along, how brave and pretty you will feel.

The song below is "Pretty" by Elliot Smith. On our honeymoon in photo.