For my first official date with James, one of us suggested we should bring a list of our favorite movies in case we needed conversation.  We needn’t have worried about awkward silences as we talked as easily and openly then as we did throughout our marriage.  At a much later date, when we did discuss our favorites, we shared very similar tastes, but only one movie appeared on both lists, “Serendipity.” 

“Serendipity” seems like the perfect movie and most apt word to describe how we met.  Seated next to each other at a bar in Kalamazoo, Michigan – where neither of us had come looking to meet anyone, but just to watch the game – we learned we had lived within two miles of each other in Pennsylvania.  Our paths had unknowingly crossed when he moved from Michigan to Pennsylvania at quite nearly the exact time I was doing the opposite. I have often wished we had met then and had more years together, an empty wish that feels even more true now. 

The movie holds one of my favorite quotes, a scene where the best friend delivers a speech that has always touched me as a writer and a romantic.  The character, played by Jeremy Piven, is an aspiring writer, trapped in a career of writing obituaries.  Unable to formulate a good “best man speech” for an upcoming wedding, he instead, writes the groom’s obituary, embellishing his own prestige as an author, but speaking to the heart of the groom after a wild and at the time fruitless search for his true love.  He says, in part:

And he goes on to say, “…If we are to live life in harmony with the universe, we must all possess a powerful faith in what the ancients used to call “fatum”, what we currently refer to as destiny.”

Today, I have set out to write my beloved’s obituary.  It took some persuading to get me to this point, but I think I always knew I could be the only one to do it. While making final arrangements at the funeral home the other day, the director asked me about James’ relatives, alive and deceased as well as his profession and it made me realize that a mere timeline of his jobs and hobbies and relations could never be a sufficient summary of his life. But there were 38 years before that fateful night at the bar, and while I know some of the stories and some of the people, I can only hope to do those years justice in how he became the man I instantly fell in love with.  

I hope that I can capture the “tapestry of events” that led to this sublime life here on Someday Farm.  I hope I can speak to all the ways that James lived in harmony with nature and its creatures, and ultimately, I hope that I can, find the right words to adequately describe a man in a handful of paragraphs beyond just profession or relations, to share with the world the legacy he leaves behind in all of us.