A couple of weeks ago my son and I went to the Smoky Mountains National Park for a week of hiking, eating, sleeping and no cell phones.
This location had been our favorite vacation destination since my wife Janet and I went there on our honeymoon forty-six years ago. I remember a funny story about the first time we took our son with us. He was about a year and a few months. We went with my in-laws. He was pretty much a daddy’s boy. He liked it when I carried him. Sometimes he would put his fingers in my hair and pat the back of my head. He also knew that I was the one who put him in his stroller and pushed him.
If you have been to Gatlinburg you know one of the favorite activities each night is to eat out and walk up and down the street until you are ready to collapse. One candy kitchen gave out free mini candy canes at some point so you had to stay up long up long enough to get your candy cane.
One evening my mother-in-law decided that my father-in-law should be the one to push the carriage so, of course, he did. I began walking next to the stroller where my son could see me. He casually glanced over and then did a double take. He stood up in the stroller, looked around to see who was pushing him and then settled back down.
My son and I decided to go on this trip and at this particular time because the end of July coincided with the forty-sixth anniversary. Cancer took Janet a year and a half ago, and we both still miss her.
We missed the way she liked the arts and crafts shops best. The T-shirt stores could make her giggle. She didn’t like candle and incense shops because the smells gave her a headache. She liked the candy kitchens. We liked to listen to her complain about stepping on the tree roots and rocks on the hiking trails.
By the time our daughter came along everything had become a ritual of what we did first, not at all and must do before we went home. Our daughter is now married with a child of her own, a husband and a job, so she was too busy to join us on our adventure into the past.
My son and I amused ourselves by trying to remember which rock Janet sat on to rest on the trails. I sat on all of them just to make sure I was sitting where she sat.
Of course, we would have preferred to have had her with us. But we can’t have everything we want in life, can we?

Excuse the quality of the photo of my son Josh. I used an old instamatic I found in a drawer.

Recently I went to a birthday party at a local beach club. Janet and I had been there a few years ago for a community orchestra performance on the lawn along the sea wall.
The orchestra played well, and the sun was going down so the heat wasn’t unbearable. We knew several people there so it was like a picnic with music. As the sun lowered closer to the horizon over the Gulf of Mexico we realized the quandary we were in. The music was beautiful but so was the view. We decided to risk a chance we might be considered boorish and turned our backs to the orchestra to watch the sun go down. We still heard the music and got to see the blues, yellows and pinks where the water met the sky. I don’t think the musicians even noticed.
Since that evening my life has changed. Janet underwent the pain of chemotherapy, double mastectomy and radiation and then died of brain cancer.
At the party I sat with some nice people, and I was enjoying myself when I noticed the sun was going down. I suggested to my table mates that we go outside to witness the sunset. They all agreed it was a good idea, and we headed to the terrace, along with several other people who had the same thought.
There were the blues, yellows and pinks, just like before, and I experienced a sensation I’ve felt many times in the last year and a half. My wife was still with me. Instead of our backs to the orchestra we had our backs to the party, which I don’t think anyone minded.
As the last glimmer of the sun disappeared below the horizon, I smiled and whispered, “This is for you, Janet.”

Every holiday has its own memories of a loved one who has passed away, and Fourth of July is no different. Every holiday with Janet was special.
I don’t even remember Fourth of July before Janet came into my life. My earliest recollections were of my brothers lighting firecrackers and throwing them at me. They thought it was funny when I screamed and jumped away. Then after my mother died of pancreatic cancer when I was fourteen we never celebrated any holiday again.
My favorite memories with Janet when we were young were watching firework displays. On July fourth 1976 we lived in Killeen, Texas, and drove out to Fort Hood to watch its fireworks from the highway. What we didn’t realize was that they were doing a full-out pageant of American history inside the stadium before the light show began. If we listened carefully we could tell from the music and sound effects where they were. I loved Janet’s commentary:
“You mean they’re still on the Revolution? Why don’t they go ahead and defeat Cornwallis and get it over with?”
“I hear Battle Hymn of the Republic and Dixie so they’re up to the Civil War. Oh good grief, another hundred years to go!”
“Great! An Elvis salute! We’re almost to the fireworks!”
Our son, who was only two years old, was asleep in the backseat. We woke him up with the display began.
“Ooh, pretty!” he said.
Years later we moved to another town and our house was just down the street from the mall where they set off fireworks every July Fourth. We could watch them from our lawn chairs in the front yard. Some years we ate homemade ice cream, others we had watermelon.
The last few years we settled into the typical old folk’s way to celebrate the Fourth. We sat in front of the television and watched the Capital Fourth celebration on PBS and then on some network station the Macy’s fireworks over the Hudson.
This year I will be alone, my second July Fourth since Janet died of cancer. The State of Florida decided my son should celebrate Independence Day with an extra shift of guard duty at the local prison. Come to think of it I won’t really be alone. I’ll have my memories of Janet and her commentary on fireworks and the music.
And that makes me feel free.

I came across a picture postcard of downtown Coeburn, Virginia, where my wife Janet grew up. If it had been a little bit larger the picture would have shown her house just off to the left.
My eyes, however, went to the main focus of the photo which was the downtown street with the stores on one side and the little mountain river on the other with a couple of arched bridges across it. Back in the late fifties or early sixties, the little river overflowed its banks and almost swept downtown away. That’s when the Tennessee Valley Authority came in and dredged the river, created a little park and put in the arched bridges.
By 1970 the town moved this old log cabin to the park and renovated it to be the community center. One Saturday afternoon the town dedicated a fountain in front of the center. I was the area editor for the Kingsport, Tenn., newspaper so I drove an hour up into the mountains to report on the gala occasion.
I stood on the bridge to take some pictures then moved in closer when the mayor’s wife broke a bottle of champagne on the fountain as the high school band struck up “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” Coeburn only had two thousand people so turning on the water at the community center fountain was a big event.
Janet and I didn’t actually meet for another two months, but by happenstance she saw me that day. She and her mother attended the festivities—rather, her mother dragged her there because everybody else who was anybody was going to be there so they were too.
“Do you know who that man is on the bridge?” My future mother-in-law always had a sharp eye for details at major social events.
“No, why should I?” Janet replied.
On reflection after all these years I take comfort in her disinterest in a random stranger standing on a bridge. I also took comfort when she told me later she had been impressed with my writing in the newspaper. She said she assumed I was some forty-year-old man who was already married. It wasn’t until we met face to face and talked two months later that she took notice.
This is my advice to anyone going through a loved ones’ things after cancer or some other disease has taken them away. Don’t think of it as a sorrowful duty to be endured. Think of it as a new opportunity to experience the thrill of why you fell in love in the first place.

I came across a dusty black ringed notebook with yellowed pages. It was in Janet’s handwriting which meant it was nearly illegible. She had many wonderful qualities but penmanship was not one of them. She had taken copious notes on a book entitled The Mummy by E.A. Wallis Bridge.
First notes she made were about the many early names of Egypt, mostly denoting it had dark mud, inundations, and was a land of olives. I’d tell you what the names were but I couldn’t make out Janet’s hieroglyphics.
She wrote several pages on the eighteenth dynasty. She listed many pharaohs and what countries they defeated. One of them was Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh who wore a fake beard. Most of them married their sisters. There was a list of gifts appropriate to give a pharaoh—horses, chariots, collars of gold and tables of cedar. She also listed all the gods with phonetic spellings, and what animals they looked like.
I almost got excited on one page. I thought she wrote lover Egypt. Upon closer examination I realized she meant Lower Egypt.
On another page it looked like she copied a prayer in phonetic hieroglyphics (I don’t know what it was; I’m guessing). I could not quite make out from the translations what the prayer was about, if it was indeed a prayer. Maybe it was a prayer said for the dead, since the title of the book she was reading was The Mummy.
This is what happens when cancer takes away your loved one. It leaves intriguing questions that will never be answered. It just reminds me why I loved her so much.