Heartbreak

This day was something that I never imagined myself doing, especially at the age of 22. I had a meeting to go plan my husband’s funeral. It still feels weird even just to type that. We were about to head to the mortuary when I heard a knock at my door, it was channel 4 news letting me know that they are doing a tribute on Logan and wanted to know if I would have an interview with them. I asked that they came back later because we were just heading out the door to go to the meeting. The guy was pretty persistent but respectful at the same time so I just decided to do the interview because I wanted everyone to know who Logan really was. He goes up my street to grab the camera man and I run upstairs and put on makeup to cover the heavy bags under my eyes and try to put some color on my face since I looked sickly and pale. The interview went better than I expected but I fought back my tears as best as I could, I didn’t want to be sobbing for all of Utah to see. He tells me to email him some pictures of Logan and Chad so they can attach them to the story and that it would air later that night.
      We dropped off my kids to my aunt’s house and drove to the mortuary. There we met Logan’s parents, my dad, and my brother and sister in laws. We go inside and I start shaking, I hadn’t ever really dealt with death before and so mortuaries and dead bodies really creeped me out. We walk in and sit around a table where we get started. I get asked about what kind of package we wanted and if Logan had a will or funeral plans that we had talked about before? I thought to myself, “are you kidding me, he was 25 years old, we talked about our future and life together, sorry but no our funeral and burial arrangements didn’t happen to come up”. Luckily Logan’s grandpa had two plots at Valley View and so he gave Logan one of them because they didn’t have any available ones there. I had no idea that funerals were so much work. As we were deciding on flowers, programs, speakers, and things like that, my mind starts wandering back to our wedding just a few years earlier. I remember how excited I was about all the details of it all; flowers, my dress, food, etc. I picture Logan just kinda sitting there nodding his head to things, acting like he really cared about decisions with it all. It’s kinda ironic that I have to make all the decisions for this to, and I just again just like our wedding, picture him sitting next to me now nodding his head as if it really matters what we choose for him. I am brought back to reality when the book of caskets is slid in front of my face. I look down again fighting back the tears, the hurt I was feeling before quickly turns into anger. As I am flipping through pages of these caskets I see this yellow one with flowers and it was as girly as girly got and I point to it and tell them this is the one I want. Everyone kind of looks at me for a minute and asks if I am serious and I say yep, quickly they realized I was joking but it was fun to make them think otherwise for a minute. If you know mine and Logan’s relationship you know that when we were mad at each other we just play jokes and “get even”, that’s just how our relationship always was, so even in this depressing situation I couldn’t help it. This is going to sound weird, but picking out his casket was kind of like picking out wedding dresses. I looked through the pages several times, but I always kept coming back to this one that was black and faded into a brown color, the inside was cream and had a black sash across the top with a silver ring around it. I had to pick something that symbolized both of us and this one did just that, and I knew it was “the one”. I am told that I need to get the obituary typed up and sent to them by the next day if I want it in there before Thanksgiving. In my head I just thought oh great another obstacle to overcome, does it ever end?  The planning was all complete and we are told that we get to go back and see Logan. They tell me that his nose is very bruised and purple and they don’t know why it’s like that but that he also has a bruise on his forehead, and they didn’t want me to freak out when I saw it. They say that they haven’t done anything on him yet and that he is just the same as he was when he left the medical examiner’s office, my stomach drops to the ground, I was so nervous and anxious to see him all at the same time.
       We are walking down the hall and come to the big open room where I take a deep breath with my dad holding on to my arms to make sure I know he is there, and we walk in. I see Logan lying on a table with just a white sheet not moving and my heart immediately shattered into a thousand pieces. I cried as hard as I did when I first found out what happened. I am about 5 feet away from him and I just cannot even pull myself together to walk closer, it was all too real to me now, there is no going back. I just wanted to curl up in a ball and be left alone. I wanted to see him so badly and yet he is right there and I can’t even get the courage to walk up to him. A few minutes pass and finally pull myself together enough to sit down next to him. The reality of it all hit me like nothing I have felt before, I couldn’t believe that it was really Logan lying there, I just saw him a few days earlier.  I wish I kept him home, or told him how much he meant to me, my biggest regret was not being able to say my “goodbyes”. Yet as he lays there, he looks so incredibly peaceful just like he was sleeping. His nose that they were so worried about just looked sunburned and not as bad as I thought, you never would have guess what his poor body had gone through just a couple days earlier. I rememeber not being able to touch him because he was just so cold. His hair was the only thing that still felt like Logan, I couldn’t stop running my hands through that adorable brown curly hair. Out of everything about him what I wanted to see and what I would miss the most would be his white, perfect, comforting smile. I never have wanted something so badly in my life, then him just to smile at me and let me know everything would be okay and that I had nothing to worry about. But seeing him made me realize that there was no changing this situation and I felt so helpless. They made me leave but I didn’t want to I didn’t want to be away from him, you could tell that he was still “there”,  his spirit hadn’t left his body yet. When I left the mortuary for the first time I felt like part of my heart was left there to, at that point I worried that I wouldn’t ever be the same..