Everwood

My gosh is that an amazing show. I have been watching the first season on DVD the last few weeks, and we got to episode 16 tonight, which is about Andy's first Valentine's Day as a widower, probably about 11 months or so after his wife had died. The previous episode was the first to tackle dating as a widower at all. It showed Andy as panicking as a wingman for the divorced reverend who is one of the best characters in the whole series.

This episode is so powerful. At the end, the psychologist tells him to write a letter to Julia (his late wife) to tell her all of the things that are in him that he never said in life. And so throughout the epidode, he is narrating this letter. (A wonderful literary structure, on top of everything else.) In the mean time, he has his first disastrous date with said psychologist, and is as uncomfortable as I was, though I fortunately did not knock things over, to the best of my recollection anyway.

One of the impulses he feels most acutely is that he could not share with Julia all the wisdom he had gained so far in his journey. He understands so much more clearly life and how precious it is and how precious she was to his life. He is more able to verbalize it than ever before. And while all the people around him tell him that she knew how he felt, he still has to get it out. Because in many ways, he needs to say it more than anything. It would be nice if Julia heard, but he needs to say it anyway.

I guess this is the upside to losing a spouse to disease rather than an accident. I got to experience some of the angst with Becky. And so I got to say some of the things Andy needed to say before she died. I was nowhere near as elegant about it as I could be today, but I did get to tell her as clumsily as I did the things I needed her to know. And in fact it was at the setting of Valentine's Day when I gave it my best effort. So this episode never fails to hit me right in the stomach, and I will spend the rest of the night missing her but comforted anyway that I said some of the things. And that those I didn't say as well as I could now were okay back then.

I have a dream sometimes about one more day with Becky in our lives. And we don't even speak to each other. We just make eye contact, and that is enough for us to communicate that we know and that we know we know, and then she goes off to play with Katie and I sit and watch and revel in the amazing mother she would be. That would be a nice dream to have again tonight ......