Cass and I talked about moving a lot… maybe as a kind of coping mechanism when life got stressful for her. But as eager as I was to be moved out and for everything to be changed, I didn’t really want to do the moving or the changing. So when the time finally came, I found another couple coping mechanisms: one was pretty terrible, the other pretty fantastic.
At her memorial, I told everyone that “Sunflowers were Cassie’s favorite flowers.” But there was a period where she hated them… no thanks to me. I took a trip out to see a field of them anyways. They say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But maybe they should say it’s in the heart of the beholder…
Between Cassie and I, one of our most memorable dates was going to St. Cloud Lakefront to watch the fireflies. And one of the things we were looking forward to most about summer in West Virginia was catching them with our nieces. Fireflies come with the reminder that there is hope in the darkness, even if they can’t dispel it.
Cassie’s relatives provide countless reminders of her, with all the little quirks they shared. But there is one person in particular who has an absurd amount of the same attributes Cassie had. She, like so many others, have helped me to rebuild something broken—an identity.
Ever since that first moment I was called “Uncle Rich” (or Uncle Ritchie), I’ve had an overwhelming desire to claim the title of Favorite Uncle! It was a dream that Cassie supported wholeheartedly, and that she even made her own. In fact, if we got to be near any of those seven nieces of ours, Cass would go out of her way to make me play with them. Because two of those nieces went with me to West Virginia, I was bursting at the seams with excitement, thinking of all the things we could do together.