Worth and Love

Everyone knows the nemesis of patients dealing with heart failure: shoveling snow. One day recently after much discussion on this topic, my husband shoveled the walk and The Wrath of The Wife descended upon him.  He knows better now.  I am the Self-Appointed Shoveler this year.  An authority not to be crossed.

We are sans garage (that means without a garage for those of you who missed out on high school French class), so our vehicles, driveway, and walk fall prey to what the locals call “lake effect” snow.  That means moisture over the Great Lake freezes into snow and dumps in our yard. 

This morning while shoveling back-and-forth (scraaaaaape and dump, scraaaaaape and dump) I was startled by the peripheral figure of a man just a few feet away.  I jumped involuntarily and pulled my hood back so I could see.  It was my husband, standing in the middle of the driveway in street clothes (no coat, let alone the prescribed mask), holding a mug in one hand, the other tucked casually in his jeans pocket.

“What are you doing?”  I said with a more than a hint of nagging irritation in my voice.  “You’re not dressed to be out here.”

“I have my coffee to keep me warm,” he said.

I’d checked the thermometer earlier.  It read twenty degrees, and with the breeze coming across the lake the wind chill had to be down around ten.  “Yeah, right.”  I glared at him.  This was a time for a Mama Bear growl.  No sweet talk.

“But I feel worthless,” he said, his eyes sunken, his shoulders droopy.  He looked like a whipped puppy that just wanted to come out and play with me in the snow.

We’d already jumped through this hoop in recent weeks, probably a dozen times.  I understood his desire to do all the things he used to do, and yet facts are facts.  “You’re not worthless.”  I used my aw c’mon voice, the we-both-know-that’s-not-right voice.

He turned and walked toward the house, coffee steaming, head down. When I came inside, he was playing Christmas carols at the piano.  At the end of  God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, I cupped his face and turned it toward me.  “You’re not worthless because you’re loved,” I said, eye-to-eye and heart-to-heart.

He stopped playing.  His eyes smiled back as he gestured toward the nativity scene on the piano. “Yeah.  Loved by you, but also loved with Almighty power that gives me hope….by Him.”