The one time abridged version of this blog, on the blog itself.

Yeah, I felt like summing up my blog in one post, so I did. And it’s all dramatic and long. Shocker. But here it is for those who might have just stumbled upon this and don't want to read it all.....

I was trying to read a blog the other day, it’s a popular bit you’re probably all familiar with. I’ve avoided it for a long time, thinking that one Saturday or Sunday I’d slug it out, fully outfitted in Rbf’s clothes and some slippers with a pot of coffee I’ll just keep microwaving as I drank it throughout the day, reading that entire blog start to finish. This, by the way, will never happen. Because I will never have a full day to devote to something like that. I kinda wish the author would just do a Cliffs notes type post, where I could just read to get up to speed, and then start from there. Then I realized there are probably people who get routed somehow to this online journal of mine, and are so lost they can’t see straight. So this is mine. And if you are one of my friends I’ve sent the URL to and you’ve just started reading, you are welcome to just start from here.

This blog started because, at the end of 2008, I got divorced and I was really pissed. My husband wanted out, but didn’t know why (who would? I’m amazing. That’s supposed to be funny…did that not come off?). He started drinking heavily and fooled around on me. Jerk, right? Not so fast. First of all, one of them looked like the business end of a frat house barbeque, and the other belonged to a religious cult where she bought some schpeal that she was supposed to join the Bay-area harem of a greasy reincarnated Messiah who was strictly into early-20’s Scene girls. My husband had wanted out, and I didn’t understand why…but I wouldn’t accept “I Don’t Know” for an answer. So he made a mistake I couldn’t refuse, and came to tell me about it. It worked. I kicked him out and started this blog.

Since that day, we have found a healthy, peaceful balance as friends. I’ve asked him to explain to me what was going through his head. I’d done nothing wrong. He wasn’t sick of me, and there was nobody he wanted more. He’s recently said that he almost just felt pulled, if not guided, away. Like he didn’t want to, but that he needed to. It was bizarre to me at the time, because he seemed so broken-hearted, but wouldn’t beg to stay. He just left like I told him to, but he seemed just as devastated as me. He’s not religious – he’s agnostic at best. But even he has wondered if there might be something more to his experience than he understood, that maybe I ended up exactly where I was supposed to be, and he maybe he needed to allow that to happen.

I was so mad when he left without even fighting for me, that the first thing I did for revenge was call my college sweetheart (the one I call Rbf). The one who broke my heart to be a trucker on the open road, and womanize to his heart’s content. I was welcome to wait it out, I came to understand. He truly wanted me there. In fact, I learned this past year that up to the day I left, he’d always assumed we’d just end up married after a few years…he just wasn’t ready to be a full time boyfriend at the time. Try telling that to an 18-23 year old girl who’s never known stability in her life and has the maturity of a slinky. She’ll eventually get smart, give up, and become “the one that got away,” and that’s exactly what happened.

Rbf didn’t hit kindergarten until age six because he just wasn’t ready to be in school all day long. This is kind of cute now, but probably freaked his mom out a little bit at the time. He didn’t leave for his LDS mission until he was 20 (the standard is 19), because he wanted to have a semester of college first, away from his hometown. He said “I didn’t want to be one of those guys that went straight from their mother’s teat to the mission field, I wanted to learn how to be on my own first.” The reason was a perfectly legitimate one. He just wasn’t ready to go straight from the farm he was born and raised, in a conservative little highway town…to another continent (He ended up going to Sao Paulo Brazil, the 4th largest city on earth with a tricky native tongue). He just wanted to be ready, even if it meant he took longer.

He was late for everything…EVERYTHING he did. At his funeral, his life sketch stated that his friends once calculated how much time they had spent waiting around for him being late. It came out to two weeks (around the clock) worth of hours. I’d say that was a conservative guess. He stayed an extra year at the junior college where we met, even after completing his A.S. there, just because he wasn’t quite ready to go to the university he eventually graduated from (BYU). It’s not that he was slow. It’s just that “slow” is how he grew.

Had he not been a year behind in kindergarten and needed that extra year at Dixie, he would never have met me. I’m so glad he grew slowly.

There is a Lady A song that reminds me of him, and I change the gender when I sing along because it’s so him. (He grew up on the side of the road, where the church bells ring and strong love grows. He grew up good, he grew up slow, like American honey.) You should listen to it, and sing it to him in your car, like I do. He’ll listen, and he’ll probably adore you for it. And then listen to the rest of the song – because that tells my story probably better than this post ever could.

Even though I should have recognized the pattern in how he paced himself in his more significant transitions in life, I took it very personally that he wanted to have a few free years before he became a husband and father forever. I took it so personally, that I gave up waiting after a few years, and turned to my Starter Husband. And we ran off and eloped. Maybe it broke my college sweetheart’s heart just a little bit, but I figured it was just as well. Fair enough to see him with a broken heart, I thought; because now we both had one. It was the only way I would ever quit him, and it was the only way to ensure I’d never have to watch him marry someone else. I was sure that day would come, and I didn’t want to be anywhere in earshot when it did. I wrapped myself up in the safe cocoon of another relationship, knowing that when he got married I would be insulated from the blow. (Oh, and it didn’t hurt that the other guy truly was amazing – after everything, I can still say that and more than mean it).

I actually had a fun marriage (when it didn’t suck ass). Near the end, we did everything with other couples. It was one of the best times of my life. I graduated college, started a career, figured out how to be my own rock so nobody else had to be, and even grew out my hair! And when I emailed him that day, three years after telling him goodbye, I had no idea what was about to happen to me.

We went to dinner a few days after my divorce. We stayed up all night talking and catching up. That’ll show my ex! That night, I learned that Rbf never got a real girlfriend after I left. That he wanted children and a family, but was waiting for the woman to do it with (and yes, he waved his hand toward me over the table, as if it were already assumed that we’d be inseparable from that meal on). I supposed if you think it’s excessive to wait around two weeks for him, you could give him some credit for waiting around for three years for me.

I apologized for being such a chore back in the day; I noted how I had charged him with the duty of being my stability. I told him I learned during marriage, college, and career that you can (and should) be your own stability. I thanked him for putting up with it. He replied, “Well I loved you. I still do.” We saw each other every time he was in town after that. We were joined at the hip. I joked about the blog, The Company Bitch, and how she got back together with her ex boyfriend and theretofore referred to him as “Reboyfriend.” This, we thought, was divinely and hilariously ingenius, and we then proceeded to steal it from Company Bitch, and refer to each other that way until he died. Sorry, CB. I hope you don’t mind that your brilliance provided a sweet part of a sad story. If you ever read this, here’s your credit.

By March, ReBf was asking me to get a place with him. But I was busy playing independent and hard to get. You know, to make up for all the years that I was neither of those things. But by April, I learned this was a very stupid plan, realized I was pissed when other girls tried seducing him, and decided I was ready to commit…for good. By May, we had made offers on two homes next to SkyPark in Bountiful (so he could hangar the plane within walking distance).

By the end of May, I’d moved in with him.

In June, I quietly learned I was pregnant right as I was losing the baby. We were shaken but excited, and decided to try again after we had our permanent house and our wedding. We wanted to do it in the right order, and we wanted to get back into the swing of our Church lives together too, so we started on that path. We left the home offers on hold, and started the process of building a custom home in the same neighborhood, to be completed that Fall. We had the down payment, the construction loan, the construction contract, and were finalizing the blueprints. I would only do stucco if it was in a dark moss green. He would only use high end shingles. I wanted my parents’ butcher block table in my kitchen. Rbf would plant 20’ pines at the perimeter of the backyard for his tree-hungry, Washingtonian wife. Even though he’d been talking to me about marriage and kids the entire seven months prior, he broke out The Preliminary Proposal point blank in a random conversation at the end of July. He seemed nervous, like I might say no, which would explain why he wanted to do it once first without a ring. I said yes, of course I’d marry him. And so it was.

And ten days later, he died with his brother and their father in his small plane over the remote mountains of eastern Oregon.

Our day would have been September 17, 2010 – ten years to the day after our first date.

Since his death, my blog has been about what it’s like dealing when you have just been the subject of what seemed like a very dramatic, obvious gesture of a higher power with very pointed intentions. I have mostly been balls-out, up-front, no-shame honest in this blog. I always hoped that it helped pull back the curtain that covers the fearful unknown for others terrified of living my nightmare themselves. I hoped that detailing a few angles of the agony would create a familiarity with the unspeakable that could give others the upper hand (“I’m no stranger to this, I can do it.”) in times of their own grief. But mostly, the sharing and oversharing and more oversharing – all of it was for my own benefit first and foremost. I received unparalleled waves of feedback and lived off of that for months. Really. It was selfish sharing, and I thank the armful of you who have read as I breathed in and breathed out for the past 18 months.

There are a few things I have not detailed here. One of them is the issue of things we (as in the Mingos and myself) have learned about the accident and wreckage, which I don’t really share because you don’t really need to know. Unfortunately, there was one thing I maybe could have talked about here that I didn’t: The emotional and psychological damage I suffered upon learning the details of the accident. The violence and physical trauma in the loss of life…it has an impact on those left behind – whether it “should” (such a dirty word) be permitted to weigh that much into our grief or not. People like to say that it doesn’t matter, but it’s easier for them to leave it at that, than it is for those closest to the deceased. For the first few months, I relived the accident 40, sometimes 50 times per day from each of the mens’ perspectives. In horrific, indescribable detail. It got so bad at one point that I developed the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. To put an end to the constant mutation of my mind’s looping replay of that day, getting more and more devastating with each reinvention of it, I had to find a way to trump my cruel imagination. After two months, I agreed to view pictures of what remained of the plane that took our boys down with it (the pictures provided were taken after the recovery of our loved ones from the site). It was a big decision. And it told me a lot of the story. After a lot of deliberation, I finally opted to view raw footage of real plane crashes, hear radio recordings of the last few moments from blackboxes in fatal aviation crashes, and faced images of actual victims in other accidents. It was devastating, horrifying, and it kinda screwed me up for life. And most importantly, it was the closure I desperately needed—the only way I could get it. I said a prayer of love and gratitude for the victims whose voices and fatalities helped me, by telling me the true story my mind wouldn’t stop writing on its own. I quietly, prayerfully thanked the families for allowing me and other similar mourners access to their painful realities. I know Rbf and his two sweet co-pilots were over it the minute it happened. But for me, who loved that perfect, gorgeous body, its smell, its presence, that smile, those eyelashes, those toenails, those arms and every hair on that head – finding peace with what happened to it was the singlemost difficult thing I’ve accomplished (short of surviving this at all). But I did it. And because it was too sensitive, I did not write about it, until now. I shortchanged this story by leaving it out. And at least now, I have really told the truth, even if it’s ugly. I won’t share more than this, and that’s all I have to say about that.

The other topic I can't really address is the day we realized they were missing, and later learned they were found - dead. I've revisited that day a few times in my mind. I get to the part where I stood on the porch staring at our housemate JB as he mowed the front lawn. He looked up at me, squinting into the bright August sun, saw my face, sat down next to me on the porch, and I lay my head on his shoulder and wept, and we didn't talk. The conversations before that moment, and all of them after it, I still can't revisit.

The final thing I won’t write on here are the spiritual experiences I’ve had that have allowed our love story to continue beyond the grave. I can share those one-on-one with some people, but it’s weird to write on the internet. Just know, I’ve had them, I continue to have them, and they are glorious.

In March, my first father passed away (I have two) after five years paralyzed from a car accident. It topped off a year God beautifully showed me off, like kids who go onto dirt tracks and rally their turbocharged RC cars. Look at this thing I made, and what I can get away with doing to it, I’m bashing it into the ground, into trees, and off ledges…and it’s still running. Look!

I lost a husband, a fiancé, a baby and a father in just over one year’s time. But look at me. I’m still rallying. Look. And most importantly, you can rally, too.

So for those catching up, this blog has become a bulletin about the things I’ve done to live up to his expectations of me, to fill my life up to the point where I have no regrets. For the past nine months, you’ve watched as I’ve tried to piece my life back together. You’ve seen what that looks like, up close. And you’ve helped. A lot.

Today, I don’t get to write about my new house, my 15 week old baby, my wedding, my Jed and my father. My story is now about my new apartment, CCI service dogs, promo-girling for the Salt Lake Bees, trips with my girlfriends, going to India with the YMAD organization, writing conventions in NYC and family get-togethers, embarrassing moments, amazing friends, ridiculous eating habits, moving, working, tripping and falling. And of course, the Reboyfriend named Jed, and how he still laces himself through all of it. And it’s second best to the life I almost got, but I’m making the most of it. I really hope he’s watching.

I hope you get a chance to polish off a pot of coffee (or some spearmint tea) and snack the day away while reading from the divorce era to now, until you’re all caught up. But if you can’t, you’ve gotten the Cliffs note version of it. Kindof. Thanks for reading this.

xo/km