B made me his advanced apology yesterday in anticipation of being a total dick next week. He opened by saying he wasn't sure I was aware that the anniversary is nearing. I am well a-f*cking-ware.
Bill, here is what you missed, dear man.
After you died, everything was a complete mess. Brendan called one night, just over a month after your death, and told me that he got me a puppy. I recognized it for what it was as did your wife: an attempt to bring life where there was a gaping, vacuous hole of Death.
The puppy was a catalyst. You would hate him. He's big and excited and not very similar to your baby girl, who also is not a huge fan of him, although he did get her to play for the first time in a half decade, so there's that. I taught your dog to play fetch, by the way. How's that for being the dog whisperer? I told you.
Anyway, he gets me out of the house every day, circumstances notwithstanding. In the midst of this, I got a waitressing job where I was making absolute bank. I thought you would be proud. I know you would be. It made it difficult to quit, but I was miserable. I made lots and lots of money and did not work very long hours, but the whole thing was just killing me, and I was spending gobs of money on B, because after you died he started doing more drugs and staying drunk all day. Scotch and drugs are expensive.
B and I quit our jobs almost simultaneously at the end of the summer. You would have thought we were fools, but B couldn't keep going, and I was being badly harassed, which I would have never told you. You wouldn't believe it, maybe, but it was truly terrible. I went back to being a barista, which sucked and paid nearly nothing, but I was having a good time. I started studying for the GRE. I decided I really did want to go to graduate school. I couldn't stop thinking about you and all the things you would miss.
You would miss us going back to school. You would miss us graduating. You would miss us negotiating our relationship as we moved in different directions, most likely, across the country. You would miss the wedding. You would miss the part where B drank too much and knocked over my relative. You would miss me crying because my family sucks and it's my wedding anyway. You would miss our honeymoon, something outlandish and labor-heavy. You would miss us finding a place to move where we could find decent professional work. You would miss me getting pregnant and acting as if the world were about to end. You would miss the look on your wife's face when she held her grandchild.
But so far, you just missed me switching jobs three times, getting clean, landing a government job with a benefits package you deserved. You missed the many job opportunities I could have given you, the ones that would have made everything a thousand times better. You missed me freaking out about my graduate school application and struggling with my panicked symptoms. You missed my sister getting pregnant and your step-daughter getting better. You missed your step-daughter holding down her first real job and actually living independently, doing well in school, living near legal marijuana and not overdoing it.
You missed your bees getting better. You missed the half a cow we bought from Joel. You missed the tenderloin last week. You missed the perfect spring weather yesterday before the cold front.
You're missing everything, and it just keeps going.
