5:22 am, 9 , and Us. by Soulez/

• 5:22 this am, marks seven years since he passed. I honor not his death, but his life, our life together. Some may feel he not be honored, more because of their loyalty to me. You see, he chose not to be with me those final years. My love for him, allowed for forgiveness of his choice, a choice I knew he regretted. A week before his death, we spoke, I knew his time was near, I let him know it was ok for him to let go and leave this earth as he struggled to hold on for a little bit more time. He let me know that the choice was not as he expected. His hopes of making amends would not be fulfilled in this life. We kissed and held each other for an unending moment, we knew it would be our last. He died not on Halloween night, but on All Saints morn. His family, kept me updated throughout the final hours. Wanting to be there, but wanting to cherish, that unending moment the week before, I was alone with our last words. Hours before his death, in his incoherence, he repeated nine, nine, nine……. Those around him struggled to understand the meaning. When his last breath was marked as 5:22 am, they agreed that the sum of those numbers, equaling 9, must have been what he meant, and laughed about how he was a son of a gun right up to his last hours. Without setting the clock back, the time would have only ended up adding to 8, but that is probably how he tricked them they thought. However, I knew the true meaning, and found comfort as well as closure in the story his sister relayed about his final hours. It was a year later that I explained the real meaning to her, when asked why I placed a number nine on his grave. It was many years before, that we had gone to the local racetrack for dinner and some horsing around fun. I had worked as a teller for twelve years, some time before that night. He was a rookie, so I explained the exacta, daily double and trifecta bets. We chose to play 1,2, boxed for the exacta and double. The science behind those numbers was simple, he was born on the 12th, I, the 21st. Then the trifecta came up and we came up with our 3rd number — 9. You see, we married on the 21st. Now that does not make too much sense, but from a numerology kind of perspective, adding the numbers of our birthdays and our wedding date gave us our third horse NINE,in our way of thinking, the number that represented the sum of “us”.
• Note: the picture is a wall plaque, a gift he gave to me many years before our adoption of the number nine. I never really took note of the number on the wall plaque until after his death, but that is another story to come.

Originally published at cowbird.com.