Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Not a Farewell Message

Amy Bradwell died on January 12, 2014. She died at home, in her sleep. I do not think she was in any pain. True to her word, she never posted a farewell message on this blog. I thought I should let the readers of the blog know that she had passed. I also wanted to say a few words about Amy. If you have been reading this blog, you probably already have some idea what kind of person she was, but there are a few things I thought readers might like to hear from me, her husband.

My dad once said of Amy that she was "the nicest person you could ever meet." That's true, but it doesn't tell you much. Lots of people are "nice." What made Amy special? One time, when we were talking about the Old Testament, I said something about what a great job the stories in Genesis, like Cain and Abel, do in analyzing the human failing of resentment. By resentment, I mean the thing that makes us feel a little unhappy when good things happen to other people (even our friends or family) but not to us. Amy at first said she never felt that way. I kept pestering her, though, and she finally confessed to a couple of incidents that happened years ago, when she was in school. They were so trivial that I almost laughed. I thought she was kidding me. Over the years, however, I have realized that she was telling the truth. She was more free from resentment than anyone I ever met. She was genuinely happy when good things happened to people she knew and was always satisfied with what God had given her. The amazing thing is that this was so even after she became ill.

She was always finding little, unexpected ways of showing she cared about you. During the last couple of months, when she was uncomfortable in bed, I would ask her how I could help her, and she would always say, "RAISE me up," in a funny, sing-song way. Then I would lift her and help her prop herself up on the pillows. I never thought much about it until her funeral service, when the music director sang "You Raise Me Up." This was never, as far as I know, one of Amy's favorite songs, and I don't remember hearing it before at our church. Whenever a contestant on American Idol performed the song, Amy would say that it was a bad choice because the song was done too much. In the last few weeks before she died, however, she told her mother (but not me) that she wanted this song sung at her service. I think she may have intended it as an Easter egg hidden for me to find. But the truth is that I was only lifting her, while she was raising me up.

Not long after we were married, we were at a party where a lady that I barely knew and who had just met Amy, came up to me and said, "You know, you're the luckiest man in this room." I'm sure I rolled my eyes at the exaggeration. But I was a lucky man, and I was still a lucky man even after Amy was diagnosed. The last four years of her life were, in some ways, the best years of mine. I found that when I was with her and doing what I was supposed to be doing as her husband, I wasn't scared, or depressed, or lonely, or even unhappy. I don't know that I've ever been much happier. I'm sure I've never been a better person.

Amy did not want her funeral service to be a sad affair; in a statement she wrote to be read during the service, she said that she wanted us to remember the laughter and fun. So I'm going to close with a couple of funny things that Amy probably wouldn't mind me letting you know: She couldn't dance a lick, but she could tell you the make and model of every car on the road. She was very tender-hearted about animals and donated regularly to several animal-related charities. However, she always threw out the literature they sent her requesting donations. It contained sad stories about animals that had been mistreated, and she just refused to read it. She had a nightly ritual where she had to watch something like two hours of Friends before she went to bed. Though she had seen every episode hundreds of times, she was still fit to be tied if even one of the four half-hour episodes was pre-empted. Whenever I told her I loved her, she would say, "How much?" "A lot" was usually not a good answer. What she wanted to hear was "So much!", which is what she always said to me.

When she got bad news about cancer or was just pissed off about something (but never about somebody), she would send you a text message saying, "Motherf***er!" When someone else was upset, she would always say, "It will be ALL right," in her sing-song way, and it never failed to make you feel as if things really would be all right.

I find myself using both of those expressions a lot lately. I miss her. So much.

John Bradwell
Amy's husband