Dear Unc, The anniversary of your death came and went last month and I thought I'd feel better after a year had passed.  But the truth is that I don't know what I expected "better" to feel like, to look like.  Only that I had hoped I'd feel differently.  I don't.  I still miss you in a way that feels fresh.  All the time.  Sometimes it's once a day, sometimes it's once a week, but I always think of you and I'm lucky because I never saw you when you got gravely ill, so my mind still flashes to your quick smile and the way you would silently crack up with your head cocked back, almost like you were hyperventilating and singing Gospel music at the same time.

Since your death, I've been really selfish with my memories of you.  I don't mean I've been keeping them from people who were meant to have them.  I just mean that I've been private in my pain, silent with my questions, crying in the shower so there are no puffy red eyes at untimely times.  Sometimes I go through the e-mails you wrote me, or find a picture of you, or think about the last thing you said to me, which was, "I'm going to give you one more hug before you become a mom."  Then I think about how you never met my daughter, who people say made you a Great Uncle.  But I know that you were already a great uncle.

I had to give a speech a couple of months ago, and I didn't know why I had been tapped since I haven't done anything significant besides potty train a toddler and master the art of pineapple surgery.  But when I heard the other speaker at the conference, Wayne, talk about his friend who had passed the year prior, I realized why God had given me the opportunity.  Wayne talked about how much he missed his friend, how his friend had died young and before he had time to "finish his work."  So Wayne thought he would try to dedicate the next year of his life to finishing this friend's work.  And then I realized how I could parlay this into my life, how I might better channel this grief.  I thought about the work you had been doing, not just as a CEO of a spiffy hospital, but on a more human level, as a uniter, as a healer, as a mad hyperventilative cackler.  I cannot do any of those things very well, but maybe I could understand what motivated you to be those things...Perhaps that can be part of my own life's work.  I'm trying to do this.  I succeed most often with the cackles. I love and miss you.  And I'm trying to love on my husband more, just in case we only have 20 more years together, too.

Love, KC