The Restored Chair

I found two birthday cards in the desk drawer beneath Don’s computer, dated September 2025. My practice had always been to send him a serious card and a humorous one.  Last year’s serious card read “Big Life. Big Love. Big Day.” Inside, I wrote “You are the love of my life—I am so lucky to have found you—so close we almost didn’t see each other.”

Yesterday, September 19, would have been Don’s 85^th birthday; it was five weeks since he died.  These 35 days have been both horribly long and painfully short, with echoes of the past, mostly of the wonderful years before this wicked disease ate away at the essence of the “love of my life.” I hear echoes of his sly humor and his fierce but also gentle love.  Now that my home is mine again, I feel the real Don everywhere.

Several years ago, one of the back legs on the large wing chair in the living room simply broke off.  The handyman in the building fixed it with a brace but warned me that it would eventually break again.  The day after Don died, Pauline was cleaning up and moved the chair no more than an inch. At which point, the handyman’s prediction came true.

Don both loved and resented that chair.  Loved it because in years past, it was where he sat when we entertained guests, when he was most relaxed.   In the last year Don came to resent the chair, because, with an added pillow, it was the only spot in the living room where Don could sit and get up without help from others. He hated being told to sit there and only grudgingly did so.  But it is the view I had of him when I read to him in the afternoon. I remember the very last time. I looked up at him in that chair and stopped. I had begun to cry.  I was reading our letters from that difficult year of our courtship (1969-1970) when he was at University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and I was at Duke University. 616 miles apart, as he calculated.

Hundreds of letters filled with words that became the foundation of our relationship, words that shrank the distance.  And I do mean hundreds.  Some days we wrote each other 3 times a day!  I still hear his voice in my head and while that voice is nowhere more evocative than in the letters, he is in everyday matters as well.  The other day, I opened the door of the linen closet, looking for a hand towel.  That closet was frankly a source of conflict.  He was a neatnik, me not so much.  “What a mess,” I said out loud.  Then I stopped because I was not sure exactly who uttered those words—was it really me or was it Don? And then I stopped and said, in my voice for sure, “Well, if you don’t like it then you come down here and straighten it yourself!”  And then, I am sure that we both laughed.

The chair has been repaired.  It sits where it is supposed to sit and there is no longer that extra cushion in the seat.