It will be 4 years tomorrow since I heard the nurse at the Palliative Care ward at Wauchope hospital say to me on the phone, “Mr Holbeck, your wife Carole passed away a few minutes ago.” I had been with Carole all day but she had been totally unresponsive. I had just arrived home when the call came.
What do you do when your very best friend and confidante [who also happened to be your beloved wife of 54 years] is taken from you? Fortunately, the words of 2 Corinthians 5:8 came into my mind, “Absent from the body, present with the Lord.” From that moment I have thought of Carole as being in bliss in the presence of Jesus and that has eased the pain of her departure. But every day as I look at her photo I tell her several times that I love her. I don’t know if she can hear me but it does me a whole lot of good to keep on affirming my love for her.
Another verse that I have found helpful is from Psalm 30:5, “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” One can never forget the love one shared with one’s beloved for it was a gift from God in His abundant love. There will always be a great hole in one’s heart which our loved one once filled and there will continue to be moments of very deep sadness. But praise God, the weeping does get slowly less and joy begins to increase with every memory of her.
As I live now without her, I continue to try to please the Lord in everything I say and do whilst seeking to live a life that would continue to make Carole proud of me. It is a way of expressing my gratitude to God for bringing such a beautiful gracious loving woman into my life as well as my way of expressing my love and deep respect for the woman who stole my heart and who loved me till her dying day. True love never ends and even the memories of that love bring deep healing. As I think of Carole and the blessings she brought into the lives of many people around the world my mind goes to the words of Proverbs 31:28-30, “Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: 29 ‘Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.’ Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.”
Praise the Lord indeed for my dearly beloved wife Carole Ann Holbeck [nee Tapsell] 1943-2019.
Blog No.503 posted on Monday 30th October 2023.
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Jim, Carole was such an astonishing woman, so full of interest in others and generous in sharing with and reaching out with a sort of intuition. Such a loss of course to her family but to we others who knew her too.
Di Z