Well, like many of you, ours is a love story. I met Wardell 30 days before my 15th birthday. We were high school sweethearts, we were best friends, we were at times adversaries (chuckle) but what is so beautiful about our story is that we were a force to be reckoned with together. You couldn’t harm one and not feel the wrath of the other. He was me, and I was he. Together inseparable for the rest of our lives.
On that fateful Fall morning in November of 2014, two men dressed in blues would take a friend and I in my office at work and deliver the fateful news, the worst news of my life. My husband had “succumbed” to injuries, sustained…those are the words forever etched in my mind. Though it was just as you see in the movies, I held out hope until that word, rolled off the gentleman’s lips…”succumbed”.
Well, that is not how our story ends, nor is that where it began. I choose to still walk with my husband because He is my forever angel and I can and so I do. And as I attend ceremonies to continue to honor him, I want each of you to remember, it is not how we fall, but yet how we stand.
We met in December 31, 1982 at a New Years Eve dance. We officially began our life together on June 8, 1991. Wardell departed his natural life on 24 November 2014. And we began this chapter of our lives on Nov. 25, 2014. I say that because he still guides me, he comes to me in dreams regularly and tells me that he promised me he would never leave me and so he never has. He lives fully in my heart, he occupies the many corners in my mind and he forever will walk with me as my angel.