My thoughts have been dwelling on Kim a lot lately. Remembering trips to her parents’ lake lot in my EXP during the summer. A time we hit a pop-up snow squall and spun out on Newburgh near Cherry Hill returning from a date with some of her friends at a comedy club in Ann Arbor. “Fatal Attraction,” the first movie we saw together (she picked it), and how she was worried that it would give the wrong impression (it didn’t). How we would spend hours just driving and talking. Leaving her house at night, and driving down Hines Drive to get back to my parents’ house after a visit.

I miss driving with Kim, holding her hand across the console, listening to the radio and looking at the scenery. Even after the kids started coming, we held hand in the car.

Holding hands.

What I think I miss the most is having her sitting next to me at mass, and unless we were holding a child: holding hands. I don’t think I’ve been through a mass yet that I don’t feel my eyes steaming up, remembering her there beside me. Funny: when we were at St. Dunstan’s, I became an usher shortly after the birth of Jeanette, and generally wasn’t able to sit with Kim. I performed my usher duties more than once with one of the kids in my arms. When Maida and the Archdiocese of Detroit pulled their petty little vindictive shit-show on the pastor, destroying the parish in the process, we moved to St. Thomas a’Becket. I wasn’t aware of the gift that they had actually given me: never again would we invest ourselves in a parish the way we had at St. Dunstan so, instead of being an usher, I sat with Kim. And I held her hand and gave her a kiss at the offering of a sign of peace, shared my phone for the after-communion prayers we said. Now, I just imagine her worshipping with the choirs of angels when the veil between heaven and earth is opened at the Eucharist.