Our Story - Part Three

The grief recovery seminar, which was held in a Catholic Church in Duncanville, ended and each of us left with the tools we'd learned about grief and the healing process. Cheryl and I were the luckier ones. We left with a friendship that was instant, yet neither of us knowing just how concrete and lasting it would become. The similarities broke the ice between us, but our mutual respect and, yes, our strong need, began to further cement a friendship from heaven.

Cheryl and I had plenty of support through our network of friends and family. We had so many loved ones looking out for us. They were ready to listen and offer words of comfort. There was still that urgent need to share with someone who was traveling the same road.

The dictionary's definition of a widow is too brief. A widow is a woman who has lost the other half of self. If she and her husband were one, she now feels like a freak sometimes. Where she once fit in as a couple, she is now on the outside and wondering where she belongs. Every aspect of her life has changed. Responsibilities are no longer shared. Burdens are now carried on one set of shoulders. She's surrounded by emptiness and feeling all alone. Even the intimacy of lovemaking, ordained by God within a marriage, is not only absent but now a sin. Cheryl was facing all these obstacles, too. I'd start to share something with her and she was right on it, telling me she was feeling the same way. We needed that type of understanding.

The following weeks and months found us on the phone in times of crisis, or sitting around Cheryl's kitchen table with our hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. It was not unusual for one of our phones to ring in the middle of the night and hear crying on the other end. We told our stories to each other so many times that we had them memorized. We could finish each other's story, but we didn't. We had learned that it should be told whenever the need arose.

"I'm back at square one," Cheryl said through her tears. "I've made no progress at all."

"Yes, you have," I reassured. "You're just having a bad day and those are to be expected."

A day or two later I'd call Cheryl with the same announcement, that the pain was as great as it had been on that first awful day, and she would remind me that it was a moment that would pass. "Give in to it," she'd tell me. "You'll feel better." We always did feel better.

I remember calling Cheryl one day and she was crying when she answered the phone. She told me she had finally felt like cleaning house and was dusting a music box. I could hear the faint sounds of Edelweiss, which she told me was Tony's favorite song. Again, I gasped as I told her it was Chezzy's favorite too. Three years later, the day before Cheryl left for Florida to begin a new life, we sat in the middle of my king-size bed and shared Christmas. She presented me with a gift I will always cherish: a music box playing Edelweiss. We let the lovely melody fill the room as we both sat quietly with our own private thoughts and tears.

Then, there was the time Cheryl called me and found me crying. "I'm making spaghetti," I explained. "I went to the pantry to get the pasta and found a package of Kluski. I'd bought it to make for Chezzy. I never made it for him, Cheryl!" I sobbed.

"Oh, Peggy, you will never believe what I'm holding in my hand right now. Kluski!" We were shocked.

Our first big outing together was to Dallas to see the musical "My Fair Lady" with Richard Chamberlain. That night she met my Dad who was in town to do electrical wiring on the building my business would occupy. She also met my children who have grown to love her dearly. They see the friend she has been to their mother and count her a blessing.

A blessing she is. Even more today than she was 14 years ago. We've shared so much together and we've helped each other heal. How God must have known we needed a friendship such as this one. I often laugh and ask Cheryl, "Who would have thought that a Seventh-Day Adventist from Grand Prairie and a Lutheran from De Soto would meet at a Catholic Church in Duncanville?"

Cheryl has always described our friendship the best: "When a door closed, God opened a window."

How true that would continue to be as Cheryl and I faced the years ahead.