Tom's youngest brother and his family moved out of our house on Saturday. The kids were both sad and excited. After they left, the house was unnaturally quiet. We wandered into the living room where Tom had me bend over a backless barstool. He proceeded to use the double strap and then the thinner paddle. He said that he was spanking me for moping. I was moping because we weren't even going to get an entire night alone yet...at least not for another 2+ weeks. His other brother was on his way and was supposed to arrive around 3AM.
As the spanking progressed, I started getting pretty excited and we even considered making love (conveniently forgoing the doctor's orders), but then we couldn't find any condoms...apparently he had given the ones we had left to his youngest brother. Of course, I ended up getting spanked for that too. :-)
We got a phone call from his brother and he said he should be in at around 4AM, so Tom decided he was going to stay up and he tucked me in at around 2AM. I woke up close to 6:30AM to find out that he hadn't arrived yet, but that he had called Tom to say he was stopping at a rest stop for 30 mins. I figured he had fallen asleep and couldn't hear his phone. Tom was worried and went to work outside before the sun was up. It turns out that I was right, he finally called by 11AM and said that he had fallen asleep but was back on the road. He didn't end up making it in until almost 1PM.
On his way from California, Tom's brother stopped in New Mexico to pick up their father's motorcycle. Over the last few weeks, I received the medical examiner's report, Tom talked to the officer on the scene, and now we have the motorcycle. We will look at photos that his brother took of where the accident happened sometime this week and we will be able to piece together what happened after he left the highway. We will never know what caused him to veer off to the shoulder in the first place, but we will know what happened afterward. ...We also need to go through his belonging that were collected from the scene...the teddy bear that I gave him might be in the box.
We are all still grieving. I've read up on the five stages of grief. You really don't experience just one stage at a time. I'll usually experience several of them one after another when I'm alone or when we talk about him. We can never really go back to what was normal...we just have to steadily make a new normal. We are doing our best to get everyone down to our house during the next couple of weeks. Although it might be a stressful having so many people around, it will be good for all of us not to be alone during the holidays. We are all going to work through this together by sharing old memories and creating new memories...one day at a time.
I found the following on Facebook back in October. Although I am not religious (to each their own), this brings tears to my eyes every time I read it.
I end this post with a challenge to remember the good times. Share at least one fond memory of someone who has passed either in a comment below or on your own blog. I will add my own comment later. If you would like to add more than one memory or memories of more than one person, please feel free to do so.
Our loved ones are not lost - they live on in us and in the memories we share of them.
