Joyful Exuberance

I was awake during the night tossing and turning and thinking about my dear husband Bill.  Many images came to my mind, and I thought again about the energy he exuded as he tackled life.  He was a person who didn’t sit still even when he was “sitting still.”

Not many people enjoy shoveling snow or weeding a garden, but he seemed to get genuine pleasure from these activities.  I can picture him carrying his bucket of weeds to the compost pile  with a bounce in his step.  I can see him stomping the snow off his boots with a look of accomplishment having shoveled the sidewalks and driveway.   I don’t think I ever saw him trudge wearily.

One of my earliest memories of this type of behavior comes from our dating years.  The summer of 1967, I was working 11 pm to 7 am at a hospital.  He was an early adopter of computers for data processing back in the days of mainframes.  He had to rent time on a local computer during the hours when the business which owned the computer wasn’t using it.  That meant he had to run his reports at night.  If his night to rent computer time coincided with a night I wasn’t working, I would go with him and read while he worked.  When his reports were completed, he would print them out.  The old printers were noisy, but they made a rhythmic sound.  He would dance to the rhythm of the printer with a gleeful expression.  I couldn’t resist laughing and that encouraged his display of enthusiasm.  He vibrated with energy and the joy of life.

I have missed the energetic aura that surrounded him.  I recently reread sympathy cards and noticed that one of his employees had written that he always knew when Bill had entered the factory, because his energy could be felt. 

That aura was apparent until the day he went into cardiac arrest.  Right up to the end, he was approaching everything he did with vigor…well, there were a few exceptions to that…things he had put up with for years, that he was just plain tired of.  But, that did not include pickleball, a sport he had just recently taken up.  A lady who played with him remarked, “With Bill, every game was the Olympics.  He went after every shot!”

Seeing him comatose, totally unresponsive for 8 days, I knew I could not keep him here.  He had made it clear he didn’t want to be kept in a vegetative state, and I knew it was incompatible with the way he had approached life.  He wanted to run right up to the gates of heaven.

I like to picture the joyful exuberance he is now experiencing in heaven.  God did not make him to sit still, so I expect he has been given an assignment that brings him joy.  He danced through life and right into eternity.  I expect he is still dancing.