He promised me he would only ride during the daytime, he would always wear his helmet and he would stay on the back country rural roads not far from our suburban home.
And he was a promise-keeper, a man of his word—which is why as daylight began to recede and night started to fall, a certainty that something wasn’t right began to permeate my consciousness.
There was nothing to do but wait-it-out. I wasn’t about to call or text him. He was on a motorcycle.
When it was officially dark outside, I turned another page of the book I was reading that leisurely Sunday afternoon and thought to myself, ‘we will have to have a serious talk about this motorcycle thing again.’ In spite of the fact that he told me how great he felt when he was out “taking a spin,” it was starting to feel like a really bad idea to me.
Maybe I could talk him into a boat or a jet ski, or perhaps he could take up golf.
I no sooner had this thought, when our 17-year-old son came to me and said, “Mom you have to come to the door. There’s a police officer who wants to speak with you.”
A few days later I was faced with the greatest challenge of my writing career—writing and delivering the eulogy of my best friend, the father of my five children and the truest man I’ve ever known…
…You know how sometimes you’ll meet a person and think to yourself or even tell everyone around you, “Oh my gosh, he was the nicest man you could ever want to meet!” Well, that wasn’t my husband.
I’m not saying he wasn’t nice, of course, he was; he was nice and got nicer with age, as men tend to do. I’m just saying that “niceness” wasn’t the most overriding quality he left you with when you met him for the first time. He wasn’t out there trying to bowl you over with his charm.
My husband was so much more than that.
He was good.
In fact, In all my life I never met a man who was, quite simply, more good.
Because he wasn’t licking you up one side and down the other, blinding you with his sparkle, it would be so easy for an obtuse or distracted person to overlook or even miss altogether the substantive qualities that made him one of the finest men many of us will ever know.
And I… I had the privilege to be his wife and the mother of his children, I worked for him (although I’m sure if he’s reading this right now, he’s saying my work claim “is debatable!”), I kept his home, I kept his kids, I kept his bank accounts and I kept his heart. What all of that provided me with was a close-up, behind-the-scenes hidden camera view. A front row seat like no other, into the way this man truly conducted himself in every facet of his life. I never once in all those years saw that man’s character, his integrity or his commitment waver.
And trust me I watched hard.
When I started dating him, (we were both 18) to use an antiquated phrase, I “set my cap for him” and I’ll just admit right here and now, he was entirely out of my league. He was extremely handsome, remarkably intelligent and possessed a confident James Dean swagger that was both indefinable and irresistible. We had a large group of friends who witnessed this romance unfolding and forecasted “Uh-oh this ends badly for the girl.” “She’s bound to get hurt.” “She’s way out of her depth.”
The piece they hadn’t reckoned on was that, oddly enough, this guy had a penchant for curly red-headed girls. On our first date, we parked out in front of the lakes on the campus of LSU and stared shoulder to shoulder straight ahead at the water talking about life. He had such a reputation as a renegade with a tough guy exterior that I decided to dig deep, “Do you love ANYBODY?” I asked.
He seemed taken aback—surprised and said, “I love my grandmother and my mom.”