The bus is filled with such characters and a broad demographic…Colombians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Brazilians, French, Germans, Americans, and so many more. Different conversations being held in different languages and accents depending on your seat…making temporary friends you know you’ll probably never see again, but we shared a 36 hour bus ride together and that’s more time than some best friends spend together in a month. I even ate lunch at a little roadside restaurant with this wonderful Peruvian nun, Erika. She was sitting alone so I asked to to join her and then requested that she bless a cross pendant I wear which my mother bought me after Jessica’s passing. Jess told her she wanted to buy it for me before she returned to The Lord, she wanted it to match another gift she had previously given to me.
It was a wonderful moment, Erika and I sat in this tiny restaurant a few hours past the Colombia/Ecuador border holding hands over the cross as she prayed for several moments in Spanish. Time stopped. My heart swelled. I didn’t feel alone. We prayed over our food, shared stories, me in my broken Spanish, and eventually became friends. She’s been doing mission work in Colombia for a few years now and she’s moving to Africa to continue this work for 3-9 years. May God Bless her journey. I bought her lunch and she gave me a few prayer cards and a pendant as a gift, what a blessing from God that experience was.
Long bus rides equal a long time to think which in turn equals a long time to grieve, process my new existence and Jessica’s passing. I get angry at times, not at God…which I have heard from several people that’s it’s okay to do and it never settles well with me…but just angry in general. Jessica was cheated out of her life. She didn’t have the most amazing childhood, she had many extremely difficult chapters throughout her life not including the last 3 years, her heart was burdened with a lot of grief…especially after her father's passing. After the wedding there was about 6 months of pure bliss for us, we had soooo many plans and goals, I actually quit my cushy job to go full time with our company and do sales consulting on the side. We were grabbing the bull by the horns as they say…what we didn’t know was that we wouldn’t hang on very long.
She was supposed to conquer the world in her own special way, like we’re all supposed to do. I actually felt with all my heart that Jessica was going to be this big health & wellness star. I used to tell people she was my retirement strategy. She had plans and was in talks to be a health & wellness expert on a national TV show, many different books to write: cookbooks, self help, inspirational…articles for magazines, blogs, websites you name it…she was an amazing writer. She was supposed to host different shows, build our company, develop products to launch and most importantly help so many people…millions of people. She was cheated out of this, millions of people were cheated out of loosing her.
She was going to be an incredible mother, I knew it with all of my heart. Our children would have been such healthy, happy, faithful, smart, athletic, outgoing and modestly speaking gorgeous little children. This was going to bring her untold amounts of joy, she wanted it so badly. She was cheated out of this, I was cheated out of this, our families and friends were cheated out of this…our children were cheated out of this.
She was working very hard to grow her faith, we both were, we didn’t feel forced to grow it due to the circumstances, we wanted to grow it…we yearned for it. We were missing something all of those years and she discovered what it was sooner than I. My sweet wife helped me to grow my faith. She was supposed to continue to be this amazingly faithful wife of mine and we were going to continue to grow in so many different ways thanks to our faith aligning with God’s love for us. We were supposed to be an unstoppable force of nature when it came to our religious beliefs. She was cheated out of this, I was cheated out of this, our children were cheated out of this and countless others who we could have helped and guided were cheated out of this.
I get angry when I think of what we had planned to do, what my faith taught me to truly believe was supposed to occur…I feel that Jessica was cheated out of her life and out of mine. I pray to honor her and make her proud until we are reunited.
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