How to Describe My Late Husband? I Can’t Find the Words

Writing colleagues have encouraged me to write down Jon’s story. What was my deceased husband like, they want to know. The same goes for friends of Jon — write a book about him, they say, record his life story. Tell us who he was. But I don’t know how to describe my late husband. I can’t find the words.

I was married to Jon for 44 years. I knew him well for 50 of his 79 years. But I am hard put to describe Jon, to put my experience of that person into words. I’ve got plenty of Jon stories, but none of them really captures the singularity that was Jon. Who was that man anyway?

Jon and God

Jon and God are a lot alike in this respect. You can tell stories about Jon and you can tell stories about God. But that doesn’t get you where you want to go.

Stories about God abound: God showed up one day on Mount Horeb as a burning bush. Thirteen centuries later, God allowed itself to be born in a cow shed.

Likewise the stories about Jon. They are there for the picking. Fifty-plus years ago, Jon grew a marijuana plant in an empty field next to a Southern California highway. The plant was the only green thing on a dry, sun baked hillside. The police noticed. Jon was arrested.

Outing Henry Kissinger

Later, Jon founded a national radio station news service that publicly outed something that Henry Kissinger wanted to keep from the American public.

Jon noticed that Kissinger — then Secretary of State — refused to be interviewed on live TV. Jon asked around about that and found out why. Though he’d come to the U.S. years ago at the age of 15, Kissinger never managed to lose his thick German accent.

Stories. A burning bush on a mountainside. A green splash of marijuana on a hillside. They tell you a lot about God and a lot about Jon.

But they don’t get at who God really is and who Jon really was (is?). They are big hints, but they aren’t it.

A Whiff of Jon

Every once in a while, I’ll get a whiff of Jon. Yesterday morning, having dwaddled over the morning paper for an hour longer than I’d intended, it was time to head downstairs to my writing room and get started on this post. I heard myself say to myself, “OK, Babs. Time to get going.”

Babs?

Nobody calls me Babs. I don’t call myself Babs. Only Jon ever called me Babs, and it was always in one of those moments when he was trying to say more to me than whatever it was he was saying to me.

And so, for a brief moment yesterday over morning tea, Jon was there. I got a whiff of Jon, the essential Jon.

Same thing with God, who, God knows, keeps a low profile. Every once in a while I’ll get a whiff of God. Driving through town on a pedestrian errand on a pedestrian day, I’ll think, oh my gosh, I’m here. It’s today and I’m here. There’s a bookstore on my left and a sports bar on my right, and I’m right in the middle of it. How did that happen?

That’s about as close as I get to God these days.

Dinner and the News — That Was Us

Same thing with Jon, the actual Jon. I can tell you dozens, hundreds, of Jon stories. We dated, and then we didn’t. We got married, we stayed that way. We didn’t have any kids, and then we did. We ate dinner at 7. We watched the news.

That was Jon. But then there was the Jon who, once in a while, out of the blue, would get my attention by calling me Babs. I can’t capture that Jon for you. I can’t evoke him for you. I don’t know how to nail down the real, the essential, Jon with words.

Any more than I can say anything helpful to you about God, whatever that is.

It took us a while, but we had those kids. More about that at “Gray Hairs, Wrinkles and Kids Who Won’t Stop Growing Up.”  Also, “Read Me a Story, Mommy. But Not That One You Wrote.”