The footnote that always starts me crying

BAR NONE; the best friend I ever had. (Her legs are swollen.) —I cry looking at this. (Photo by Debbie Bell.)

“• My beloved wife of 44 years died of cancer April 17, 2012. She was 68. I miss her dearly.”
There it is, the footnote that always starts me crying.
How was I to know my wife’s death would leave me so devastated and heartbroken?
I call it a footnote, although it’s not numbered like college textbook footnotes, or dissertation footnotes.
It’s bulleted, and I lead it with an italic HTML-tag (<span style="font-style:italic;">), so it appears as italic, not as regular blog-text — this blog crunches HTML.
And of course it appears at the end of a blog, explaining as necessary.
I have a fairly large file of “footnotes;” stuff I copy/paste to the end of blogs.
They often get used, so to avoid retyping they get copy/pasted from this file.
“• I had a stroke October 26, 1993, from which I pretty much recovered” is another copy/pasted footnote I often use.
The fact my wife died appears often in these blogs, so I explain it with a footnote, although sometimes I explain it in the blog-body.

40 YEARS AGO

Photo by BobbaLew.

This is the image I always had in my head, no matter how bad she looked.

“That’s it,” I say through tears. “It’s as simple as that.”
There are other things that trigger crying, like that my condition makes me feel like I’m failing my dog.
I’m told I’m not, and my dog keeps licking me.
She also comes when called, but it’s like she just wants to be with me, not a result of training.
So even though I may start crying feeling I’m failing my dog, I know what it really is: “• My beloved wife of 44 years died of cancer April 17, 2012. She was 68. I miss her dearly.”
A friend at the grief-share I attend tells me I will get upset come birthdays and anniversaries.
I don’t think so.
What I will get upset by as when all her plantings bloom for Spring or turn for Fall.
Like our gigantic hedge of bridal-wreath when it flowers, or the Rose of Sharon when it turns red for Fall.
That bridal-wreath flowered about the time she died, and she was smitten. She planted it. A gigantic hedge of white.

• “HTML” is the “Hyper-Text Markup-Language” read by Internet-browsers. It can do lots of things, but I use it in these blogs to underline, embolden or italicize text.
• My current dog is “Scarlett” (as in “Scarlett O’Hara”) a rescue Irish-Setter. She’s seven, and is our sixth Irish-Setter, a high-energy dog. (A “rescue Irish Setter” is an Irish Setter rescued from a bad home; e.g. abusive or a puppy-mill [Scarlett was from a failed backyard breeder]. By getting a rescue-dog, I avoid puppydom, but the dog is often messed up. —Scarlett isn't bad.)