One More Day
“First thing I’d do is pray for time to crawl. I’d unplug the telephone and keep the TV off. I’d hold you every second. Say a million ‘I love yous’. That’s what I’d do with one more day with you.” -Diamond Rio
Dear Alex,
What I wouldn’t give to have one more day with you. I used to involuntarily make such a list in my head, over and over. “I’d live on the streets the rest of my life for one more day with you… I’d give up ever existing if I could exist with you one more day. I’d take it all back, every single moment of everything good that ever happened since you were born, and would have moved the four of us into the middle of the woods by ourselves if I could have just one more day with you…” I don’t know how not to make the list. I don’t know how not to be willing to trade everything for one more day with you.
Son, I understand now more than ever why God doesn’t give us everything we want, because we wouldn’t not be able ruin ourselves and the people we love. I would have brought you back. Even believing with all of my heart that you are in a perfect place with a perfect God, the hole you left in my world is so deep (Your “absence is like the sky, spread over everything” CS Lewis), on a bad day, I’d had zapped you back here with me and kept you in what would surely seem like an earthly hell to you now that you have experienced heaven. Just because I am too frail; too human not to. So, I don’t make these lists anymore, Bub. Instead of thinking about what I’d give for one more day, I try to think about the days that God gave us.
Yesterday, I was thinking of what I might do with one more day with you. Three distinct memories came to mind—a gift from God in itself, as so many of my memories of you have been lost by the way my mind still tries to protect itself.
My mind went to the day we spent together on August 23, 2023, two months before you went to heaven. You texted me your dad and me at 8:15 am and said, “would either of you be interested in going to top golf around 11 then getting lunch after? I’ll pay.” That was the best day.
That’s what I would have done with one more day with you.
My second memory was of August 13, 2022, when you and I went to the Last Call Alan Jackson concert together. I remembered one of the funniest things you said- still makes me laugh out loud. We were driving up Church Street, and I hadn’t been to downtown Greenville in so long that I couldn’t remember where to park for the Arena. As we drove around, we noticed some slightly aged folks wandering about, clearly not city locals. You looked at them, pointed, and said, “Yeah, Ma, we’re definitely in the right place.” You didn’t even mean it to be funny, but I laughed until I hurt. Then I remembered the man who was nearly blind, carefully making his way to the seats beside us. And all around us, so many older people were going to great lengths to be there to see Alan Jackson one more time. I looked over at you, tears in my eyes, and you had them in yours too. And we both knew we were part of something much bigger than just a concert. And I remember us singing every word to every song the whole night.
That’s what I would have done with one more day with you.
Lastly, I remembered October 15, 2022. You asked me to go to the Georgia/Vandy football game with you. It was the only UGA game we’d ever been to together. We talked about it every single year for almost 20 years and never did it somehow. I taught you to be a Georgia fan, but you taught me about the entire campus and traditions that day. We went to the Dawg Walk- my only one ever. We did the kickoff barks together. We took the selfies and videos and we watched the Dawgs dominate 55-0.
That’s what I would’ve done with one more day.
And maybe you knew that, or maybe God knew it and gave them to me because He knew I would so desperately need it.
The hardest thing about you being gone… is you being gone. But one of the other hardest things for me, something I realized the first time I came back into our house after you died, was realizing that I might have to live another 40 years on this earth without you. There are hard things in life and there are impossible things, and I told the Lord at that moment- THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE. Fortunately, He said to me “with Me, all things are possible” and “all things are possible for him who believes.” So here I am still: He has made it possible for 628 days so far.
Time is such a funny thing, Little Man. I used to think it moved too fast. I never knew how relative it was until I got that phone call, 1,001 minutes before you died. Those 1,001 minutes felt like 1,001 days. Bud, I am sorry to report to you, that time is still ticking too slowly. A lot of times I have no idea what year I’m living in. I live in it. I do normal things. I have a normal job and normal conversations, but I can’t remember how long it’s been since I’ve seen you unless I ask the internet how many days it has been or how many minutes it was between the time I got the worst phone call of my life to the time you breathed your last.
I try not to count because it always ends up with me, like my all-time favorite prophet, asking- “How long, O Lord?”
Alex, I mainly want to tell you about the Lord’s answer to that question, though I know you already know this. His answer to my “How long, O Lord?” is always the same- Just one more day. Just one more day and then we’ll have an eternity to be together. Time and Days won’t even be measured anymore when we’re with the Lord who stands outside of time. Where you are, one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as one day. And son, I know I said I’d trade everything to have you back, but those are fleeting feelings. In my heart, I want you to be right where you are. I have a deep peace knowing that you are with Jesus. The very thing I am longing for is what you are experiencing. You have finished the race, son; won the prize. In all my missing you, which is mostly what I write to you about, I hope you know the utter joy I have for you. (How grateful I am for a God, who knowing the pain of losing a Son, gave His up so that mine could live eternally.)
And I want to be there too one day because while I can’t really understand it, I believe this about God with all my being: “Better is one day in His courts than a thousand elsewhere.”
Happy Birth-DAY (or a thousand years) in heaven, Little Man.
All my love,
Ma