Seasons of Love

There are lots of moments and experiences in my life that I am happy to describe as lovely. I can find lovely in grief and it's, well, lovely! Lovely is warm and positive, it is always welcomed and affects you strangely in much the same way as grief does. Surprised, crying, hopeless and empty for grief; surprised, smiling, laughing and good for lovely.
My girls are lovely on Father's Day. Celebrating me as a dad! They buy me gifts, they take me out and the 'lovely' to cap it all is they tell me 'I'm amazing' and a lovely dad for them. I hope I am ?  I don't really know? But the lovely I describe is part of accepting where I am at the moment. I'm remembering, longing, wishing, craving for that beautiful and lovely Susan to be close to me again. As much as I know that can never be there is a momentary thought that is actually lovely.
I drive at speed down the motorway in her car. I put the roof down and turn the music up. The cloudless sky is above, the wind  rushing around as I tempt myself to break the speed limit hurtling towards the setting, amber sun. In this moment, in this exact moment, Sue and I are in love all over again, laughing and smiling, looking at one another and touching each other's hands. For a brief moment, for more than a second, even minute this was lovely! Me and Sue were together again, for a moment, just a moment and it felt lovely.
5788800 seconds, 96480 minutes, 1608 hours since Sue died! How do you truly measure a life and love together? I count our lovely times together; the laughs, the loves, the children, friends,  the disagreements, the tellings off, the cinema, the theatre, the music, holidays and goings out, the simplicity and complexity of being together. These moments are worth more than the seconds, minutes, days and hours that actually accounted for our life together and that is what is important now for Lily, Louise, family, Mandy, Ben, Hallie, Sam, Jane, Nanny and Pa. The beauty of moments together and taking care of one another through our 'Season of Grief'.
There was this time that we took for granted. It was all of us together living our lives and enjoying one another's company, tales and stories, laughter and advice. It was exactly 5788800 seconds, 96480 minutes, 1608 hours ago that something happened to abruptly end all that and teach us not to take anything, anything for granted and to enjoy and love one another for the now, both us and life itself. It's summer now but next it will be Autumn and so on and so forth. Sun will burn and then leaves will fall but facts will never ever change. We won't forget but we carry on always searching now for these lovely moments. I know that Sue would want that for us all, find those lovely moments and babes we found it today in our beautiful, amazing daughters. They looked after me today on Father's Day, they look after me for all days as I try to do to them. I'm proud of them and they would make you proud. That's a lovely thing.