Somewhere near Innsbruck before the storm rolled in.

I’m sitting soaking in the pleasure of a post-deployment morning with coffee so hot, thick, and strong that the milk hardly changes its color. I think I forgot what real coffee looked, smelled, and tasted like after two months of a watery, iced drink that passed for coffee. The sharp crack of thunder interrupts my mindless wanderings and I look up to admire the rolling clouds obscuring and highlighting the Austrian Alps out the windows in front of me. I return to the soft boiled egg and the book next to the plate. The book stirs other memories causing splinterings sharp enough that I set down my fork. We listened to this author while driving around other mountains, hills really, in Virginia during the last few weeks of my mother’s life. Liz and I listened, trying to grasp the notion of gratitude bringing joy, because we each needed to believe that joy would one day come again. This morning, I’m reminded of multiple moments while reading, “What matters in your life is not so much what happens to you but what you happen to remember—and how that will influence how your life happens” (Voskamp). I set the book down and allowed myself to remember a moment when memory shaped how my life happened.

A feed “store” seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

I spent the summer teaching writing to American military students in Kuwait. It wasn’t my destination of choice, but it’s where the company needed me so I went…in the dead of summer. Heat and I don’t mix well. I am a human furnace 100% of the time; I don’t need to live in a natural furnace. The place lived up to most of my expectations. I was hot 98% of the time, exhausted 110% of the time, delighted by thoughtful students most of the time, bored by the amount of time in the car, and disappointed that the desert didn’t match my image of rolling hills of sand.

For the first week or two, I found myself crawling into bed at night grumbling about any number of things. It honestly didn’t matter the topic. I simply wanted to grumble. I would lie in bed picturing green things, like the rolling hills of Virginia, which naturally led me to memories of an audio book playing while Liz and I drove to forget the disease taking her life. The book’s author challenged us both to choose gratitude at a time where finding something to be grateful for took every ounce of energy I didn’t feel I had. That memory led to another where Liz lay on a hospital bed looking at me with deep concern, a look I can still see with clarity, while asking me what I would do to find peace “after.” “Choose gratitude,” she challenged me. And now I happened to remember that moment in the middle-of-nowhere Kuwait and I chose. That simple decision made a difference. I laughed more, delighted more, and was able to give more to those around me.

That is until the AC failed in my room.

 

I heard the leak around 2 a.m. but chalked it up to weird dreams. When I woke drenched in sweat, I realized it wasn’t a dream. The AC was leaking a foul, dirty water into the dorm room. The only way I can describe the smell is to imagine every junior high child you know wearing one pair of socks all summer, then piling those socks into a trash bin, and leaving the bin in the sun….adding water occasionally. I was living in a toxic waste dump. Soon my dorm neighbors brought cans of Lysol to help keep the smell from their rooms. Housing had 72-hours to fix the unit. 72-hours later, they had the unit functioning again.

The morning they did was also the anniversary of Liz’s death. I was driving back from my once-a-week, overnight stay at a northern location. I was grumpy. I was hot, dirty, and desperately wanting to crawl in a hole. I simply wanted a few minutes without responsibilities to commemorate Liz’s death. Four years, how in the world has it already been four years?

But there wasn’t time or space to sit with memory. The AC leak had soaked nearly half the room so I needed to pick up the carpet cleaner from lodging, move bunk beds and lockers around, all in order to clean the unnatural disaster area. The swamp cooler effect mugginess meant I was dripping before I began cleaning. To say I grumbled would be a flat out lie. I bitched. I moaned. I dragged the too heavy furniture around trying to beat down the smell and stave off the mold. By the time I finished cleaning and disinfecting the room, then cleaning and disinfecting myself, I wanted to collapse. But I still had responsibilities, work, and a class to teach. I didn’t have time to remember I thought, not fully realizing I had been remembering the entire time.

Flames from oil refineries, always somewhere in the distance, cast an eerie light each night.

As I walked back to my room close to midnight that night, my feet dragged in the sand and I didn’t even notice the oppressive heat. I stumbled on the stones outside the learning center that had been there all summer even though my head faced the ground. I realized the air around me seemed unusually bright so I glanced up at the sky and saw a full moon. It was a simple thing, the same full moon I’ve seen every month. I delight in that consistent round orb regularly. But tonight it felt like a reminder of something larger than myself. Liz knew my infatuation with the moon well and bought me moon photo calendars to say she saw me. So four years after I said goodbye to her, I stood in the 115 degree evening air, watching the moon rise in the sky, and chose gratitude. After all, it’s what she would have wanted. In the midst of moments when I want to sit down and quit, I choose to be thankful for the simple things like a full moon in a desert sky. I finished the walk back to my room and posted my gratitude online as the most heartfelt act of remembrance I could conjure.

The decision reframed the rest of my time in the desert and I walked away with new memories that will no doubt shift and reorder themselves much like the sand does each day in Kuwait. A year from now I won’t remember the little sources of my grumblings, because they will have scattered like the dust they are.

Already, as I sit on a balcony in the Alps with thunder ricocheting through the mountains and the smell of pine logs burning in stoves, the 125° days feel a world away. I’m looking around at a million new sights and sounds for which to be grateful. The monotony of a flat desert with only oil fields and power-lines to disrupt its features has already begun to recede. What I do remember are the faces of new friends, eager students, and once frustrated students who get an answer quicker than their peers. In other words, I remember the things that matter: people. If I learned nothing else from my years with Liz, it is that people matter more than circumstances. She may be gone, and I can’t fill the hole she left. But I can choose to let her live in the choices I make. To me, that is the essence of gratitude and I kinda think Liz would agree.