My muscles ache again today. The doctor says it may be a virus. Hope that is what it is. Or maybe I am just grieving…maybe my aching hole that is in my broken heart is mending. I remember my bereavement counselor said that when you lose a spouse that there is a special hole in the heart that will always be there…but that over time it will get smaller…that over time it will start to mend.

Yesterday, I met with Mr. C, the representative from Memorials By Design. “We Come To You” it said in their letter….we come to you.

Yes, after almost nine months since the passing of my late husband, I sat in my kitchen, the kitchen where my late husband used to cook all his wonderful meals – baked salmon with dill sauce, stuffed chicken with feta, crockpot chili with all the chili trimmings – I sat in that same kitchen where he used to cook and I picked out the memorial that will go on his gravesite.

“Which bronze would you like to honor your late husband?” asked Mr. C, the nice man who was trying to make this as pleasant an experience as possible. He showed me a variety of bronze plaques for the gravesite, the plaque that will note my late husband’s final resting place.

I picked out a simple rectangle with a smooth edge…no fancy beveled design or flowery finish…my husband was a simple man. He was not a flowery kind of guy (although he did occasionally buy red roses for me on my birthday and on our anniversaries…I miss his flowers.)

“What words do you want to engrave on the memorial?” asked Mr. C, as he flipped through the samples in the brochure. I noticed there were some plaques with lots of words while others had just a few. Some had scenes of fields and some were quite sterile. Some had pictures of the moon and others the sun. The word ‘beloved’ was a popular word that began most sentences.

Yes, my husband was my beloved. Wish I could still sit with him at the kitchen table and share stories from my day as we used to do for almost 25 years. Wish I could laugh and joke with him and see him wince as he would do if he knew that his Yankees didn’t have a chance at the playoffs this year. Oh, how I wished yesterday that my late husband was sitting opposite me at the kitchen table instead of Mr. C.

“What words do you want to engrave on the memorial?” Mr. C asked again.

“If I use the word ‘beloved’ I will have to add so many words,” I said. “He was a beloved husband, father, son, brother, uncle, cousin, nephew, friend, Yankee fan, Giants fan…the list could go on and on.” Yes, the entire memorial could be filled with beloved words for my late husband…lots of great words describe the great man he was.

Instead, I settled on a simple memorial bronze. It will have his name. It will have the date of his birth and the date of his death. (Mr. C said these dates are important because if and when we have grandchildren and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren and these grands want to trace their geneology…they will be more easily able to trace the great man who was one of their great descendants.)

Between these two dates will be a beautiful Star of David. A Star of David to honor his faith.

And on the bottom of the memorial will be three simple words:

In Loving Memory

Judi