The Course of a Thousand Days

Dearest Rachel –

It’s not as obvious as looking on the calendar and seeing a “23” on it, as happens every month. It probably would have even passed my notice if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been sending “a line a day when you’re far away,” and the site keeps tabs of how many days in a row I’ve been doing this (although, in order to get to the very date, I have to add another twelve days). But it’s a milestone, nonetheless – it’s been a thousand days since you had to go, and we had to let go of you.

Numbers, no matter how large or small, are relative, depending on what they’re describing. Particularly, when they’re used to describe a length of time, they’re hard to grasp; I’ve mentioned several times about Mark Heard’s reference to the commonplace nature of days, how he “thought they’d number in the millions” between him and his beloved, and how absurdly long that time would really be, if you did the math.

And yet, a lot can happen in a thousand days. History speaks of the “Thousand Days of Camelot” when referring to the Kennedy administration, a legendary title for a legendary (as in, over-romanticized and fictionalized, but still, there are those who look at it fondly as a more innocent time – and not entirely without reason) period of time. In fact, it’s just slightly more than a thousand days, but why quibble over a few dozen extra?

More personally, virtually the same amount of time passed between the first time I recall speaking to you one-on-one (at breakfast on your first Halloween on campus, when I sat across from you in a virtually empty cafeteria, and tried to convince you not to be afraid of me in my split-face makeup – which I needn’t have worried about, as you were familiar with the likes of Sharaz Jek even more than I was) and the day I finally proposed to you. And if there is an issue with the fact that this was also a month longer than a thousand days, well, by then, the conclusion was already foregone; it was only a matter of when I would ask for your hand.

Unfortunately, no such meeting – let alone proposal – has happened in the intervening days. However long it’s been, nothing like that has taken place. Likewise, I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of a YouTube channel. I know that, while you supported my attempts to make one, you had no real plans to participate in helping me create and sustain it, but with you gone, the will to make it just isn’t there. Plus, these letters take up a lot more of my time that I would otherwise have spent creating this or that. And there’s also the fact that I thought I had answers for my intended audience that I now know I really didn’t, so there’s so much less reason to offer solutions I no longer believe in.

But I suppose I haven’t the right to bemoan what hasn’t happened over the course of the last thousand days, when so much has taken place. In that time…

• I’ve had your body turned to ash (per your request), some of those ashes turned to diamond (which you never thought of, as far as I know) and the diamond set into a ring that fittingly enough (and you’ll pardon the pun), I’m still not entirely accustomed to wearing.

• I’d enlisted help to clean out the house (which you would not have appreciated, as it entailed getting rid of so much of your stuff – but with you not here to use it, what else was to be done with it? You knew it needed to be done), and in so doing, uncovered various troves of memorabilia that had long since disappeared within the house: photos, videos (both our own and your parents’) and most importantly of all, a plethora of handwritten notes, both on random pages and in your old study guides.

• Some of that memorabilia, particularly the photographs, I’ve used in my newfound fascination with artificial intelligence, as I dipped my toe into creating new pictures of you, first with the help of various commercial sites, and then as part of a standalone program that I can (sort of) control. I admit that I don’t know if you’d be equally fascinated as I (you were the computer major of the two of us, after all, but I’m the one who’s been buried in the guts of these machines lately), or if you’d be mildly concerned about the capabilities of the technology, and what it might be able to do without someone’s knowledge or consent. But there’s no checking with you about this anymore on the subject, so I can only hope you don’t mind too much. Maybe you’ll have a few words for me when I finally join you, or maybe it will all be forgotten by then.

• Meanwhile, once I got the house cleaned out, I’ve been able to take advantage of the ability to admit that, as a guy, I’m not particularly good at keeping a place clean, and hiring out for someone to come in regularly to maintain the sense of cleanliness and order that the initial, painful purge has brought. I know that this was something you wished desperately that you could bring yourself to do, and I’d like to think you’d be glad of the results (and the fact that I’ve been able to keep it up, more or less). Even more so, with the house as clean as it has been, I’d been able to finally remodel the kitchen as we planned to do once our oven gave out. We even managed to update the laundry room as well; and although that wasn’t quite as necessary, it still looks so much better than it did, and I so wish you could have seen the changes.

• And that’s just what’s been happening at home. With the release of the vaccine (although that’s turned out to be a can of worms in itself – just ask Lars about it. Or, on second though, maybe don’t), I’ve been able to do some of the traveling we’d planned on doing once we were allowed out of the house. Sometimes, it didn’t go well (although even then, I recognized that the misadventures are the ones that provide some of the best stories); other times, everything went (almost) just as planned, despite my fears. I’ve even managed to get Daniel bitten by the travel bug, although the places he would want to go are only the places that we’ve been to within the past year – Israel (which is going to be a non-starter for a while, what with the current war situation, but at least he’s gotten there once) and Japan – but hey, that’s two continents he’s been to since you had to go. Wouldn’t you be proud of him for making some memories of his own?

• And at the same time, I’ve been getting away from the house and the ‘office’ to get some exercise in. Not just the walks with Lars, but actual, full vigor, ten-calorie-a-minute-and-up cardio workouts. I hate every minute of them, but the results speak for themselves, as I’m down fifty pounds from my peak around the time of your accident. Again, what we could have done to get here – and how we would have enjoyed the results – I can only imagine. And while I still find myself questioning the purpose of this pursuit, the fact that I’ve been able to ditch my blood pressure medication (although I have had to start dealing with heartburn medication, if only on an over-the-counter basis at this point)

All this, over the course of a mere thousand days. And much of it is rather only the beginning. We still plan to get you to the island for one last send-off, but not until I reserve a portion of your ashes to be scattered, a little bit at a time, in the places I’ve yet to visit. And I do plan to visit so many places, not just on the one big trip coming up in the early spring of next year, but I expect to go abroad at least once a year, every year, for as long as I can. I hope to take Daniel and (at least some of) the girls along in most cases – and I hope that, beginning one day, those trips will always be with ‘Megumi’ – but some of those travels will likely be taken alone throughout the foreseeable future. In those cases, Daniel will hopefully learn to take care of the house – and the bills – in preparation for when he takes possession of the place on his own. All the while, I’m going to continue to work on my weight and muscle tone, and see if I can’t get back to where I was in college. After all, if I have to start over, I might as well see if I can’t reset everything about me that I can.

And with that being said, I have to ask you to keep an eye on me over the next however many thousands of days I may have left. I’m going to need it, honey.