The house was so quiet without John. We’d been married just shy of 40 years when he passed away, and ever since, there’d been a hole in my heart I felt nothing could ever fill again. Today was his birthday, and the day before our big family reunion—my first time going without him. In the kitchen, I pulled out the ingredients to cook my famous baked beans for the party, expecting at any moment for the sound of one of John’s favorite jazz CDs to come blasting from the other room.
I was a fan of praise music myself, but John loved jazz artists like Miles Davis, Bill Evans and Yo-Yo Ma. “Just listen, that’s a good beat, right there,” John would say, scatting along. He had more than 600 CDs in his collection, most loaded into a multi-CD changer in our living room. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to touch it since he passed.
Maybe now I should,I thought. I needed something to fill the silence, the constant reminder that John was gone. It might as well be John’s favorite music. I walked into the living room and reached for the power button on the player, my finger hovering over it for just a moment before pressing down. Click. A CD locked into place.
A string orchestra began to play. Out of the hundreds of CDs, and the thousands of songs, I recognized this one immediately. A song that couldn’t have possibly been chosen at random. Eva Cassidy began to sing: “Heaven, I’m in heaven and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak…”
The sweet melody followed me as I headed back to the kitchen. The silence had been filled. And my heart had been too.
