He is someone who journeyed to freedom, I think, and I was married to someone who walked to freedom. The culmination of the freedom was love and family. That’s all he did, that’s what he did.

As I sit alone with these words, I think about how brave he was in so many ways, and how brave he was to go into that studio every day with his demons and his angels, and labor to put them on canvas.

“I wake up grateful, for life is a gift.”

What a profound mystery it is to me, the vibrancy of presence, the realness of it, and then, gone.

For Rilke, God is the companion, the hand the reader is exhorted to take. Ficre is not my God; neither do I know who God is. But I find this force in art, poems, and the community I have made.

Something is fading, not the memory of him but the press of memory, the urgency of writing, the closeness of him. He is somewhere in the atmosphere, but also not.

his love of books and his insatiable curiosity of mind

how can we be so happy, when we have been through so much? The forest is not denuded. The trees are standing tall.

“Bless him for loving you when you needed it, for healing you, and for preparing you for me.”