Written Jan 24, 2011 11:01pm
Hello Everyone,
It has now been a week since Melanie passed away, and time has been a blur. The "celebration of life" gathering yesterday was overwhelming, for a number of reasons. Although it was obviously a very sad day, I would also say it was a very good day.
I would like to thank everyone who came out to celebrate Melanie's life on Sunday. I don't have a very good estimate as to how many people were able to attend, but a rough guess would be between 400-500 people. It was great to visit with people, share stories about Melanie, laugh and cry together, and the cake was excellent (good choice sweetie). It was exactly the kind of day Mel would have wanted. The last party she ever planned was a success, just like every other party she ever planned.
In the days leading up to the event I had a chance to be surrounded by friends and family, which served as a nice (and necessary) distraction for me. Many thanks to everyone who has been taking care of me and keeping me sane. But I also had plenty of quality time to reflect on things, and really embrace and cherish all the wonderful memories I have of my time with Melanie.
Making the photo slideshow was simultaneously one of the most heartbreaking and heartwarming things I have ever done. Going through our gigantic collection of photos from our life together and picking out my favorites, choosing the music from Melanie's playlists of favorite songs, and compiling it all was hard to describe. It helped me fully realize how special what we had was, but it also made me realize the enormity of what has been lost. All I know for sure was that it was good for me to do it, because it forced me to inch my way closer to acceptance and closure. I'm definitely not there yet, and it will probably be a while before I can say I'm totally there, but every little bit helps.
By the way, I'm willing to burn a copy of the video I made for Melanie onto a DVD for people she was close to, or couldn't make it to the celebration on Sunday, so just send me an email. It ended up being about 42 minutes long so it's too big to just email, and I'd feel weird about putting it on YouTube or something.
Melanie and I had a lot of little phrases and sayings and theories between just two of us, but I'll share one of them here because it is very relevant. We always said that "time is relative" - but not at all like Einstein's theory of relativity. We didn't have an equation filled with variables or anything, and it certainly wasn't based on physics. The meaning behind our version is simply that the quality of time spent with another person far outweighs the quantity.
As an example of our "time is relative" saying, we had only been officially dating for about a year before we decided to get engaged, and we hadn't even known each other for much longer than that. To a lot of people, that may seem like an unreasonably short time to make such a major decision, especially since we were so young. But from the day we met all we ever wanted to do was spend time together. We spent so much time together in fact that the guys on my floor in the dormitory started referring to us as "JoeMel" because we were almost never apart. I would say that we got to know everything about each other very quickly, but I think it would be more accurate to say that we didn't even have to because it was like we already knew.
The reason I say that this is relevant now is because even though I only got to spend ten years of my life with Melanie, I take solace in knowing that we shared enough love in those ten years to last ten lifetimes. Thus, "time is relative". Our desire to spend time together never changed through the years, and even though the simple logistics of life and work would sometimes get in the way during our 7+ years of marriage, we still spent every possible moment together for those years. More importantly, we intensely enjoyed each and every one of those moments spent together, and had a lot of fun along the way. So back to our theory of time being relative, technically we had both quantity and quality. And although I could have never, ever gotten my fill of time spent with Melanie, and it was terribly unlucky that we were torn apart so soon, I also feel very, very lucky to have shared everything that we did. That is really what is most important for me to remember.
That's all for tonight...
-Joe Pike
joepike@visi.com
763-350-7899 (Joe's Cell)
this
