"You're gonna miss me when I'm gone."

My grandfather died while I was in high school—a man who was also my next door neighbor, who taught me how to tamp dirt around a fencepost and split wood—a man whose raspy laugh still lingers in this weary world decades later.

I wasn’t sure, at that young age, how two people who loved each other that much could be separated. If the universe would even allow it, or if time and space would no longer compute. It felt as if life had an error code, but still refused even the smallest of delays.

I picked up my grandmother for church one Sunday night not too long after. Through her screen door I saw her get up from her kitchen table, her mouth moving in speech.

“Who were you talking to, Mema?” I asked as she got in my truck.

“No one,” she said, and it broke my heart.

My truck still went in reverse, and gravel still crunched beneath it.

“You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”

That’s what my wife, whom I adore, used to say to me sarcastically when we were young—when I would point out something that bothered or frustrated me.

One of those things, early on, was her tendency to put Incredibly Large Things in Incredibly Small Trash Cans.

I would be like, “Honey, you know that if you put a Clorox bottle in a bathroom trash can then…that means…you can’t put a single other thing in it…

…thus defeating the purpose of a trash can?”

“You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone,” she would say.

Then there were the thermostat wars.

We lived in a very old house, which may as well have had screens for windows. My wife, who is frugal and tough, and also part Eskimo it seems, would turn the thermostat down so low in winter that I would take pictures of it and post it to social media looking for some help talking sense into her.

I would turn it up, she would turn it down. I would turn it up, she would turn it down. Thus we went, good-naturedly, with laughs and eye rolls, back and forth. I’m sure it was terrible for our HVAC, but we were in our twenties—a good excuse if you ever need one.

“You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”

Jason Isbell’s song If We Were Vampires has always caught in my throat. “Maybe we’ll get forty years together,” he sings, but what we have can’t and won’t last forever.

If we were vampires and death was a joke
We'd go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn't feel the need to hold your hand

The thing is, though, that we often do act like we’re vampires. Like this could possibly go on forever. That the time and the days are not precious.

I was writing some content for young married couples recently, and one of the points I put in was “Know your spouse is a gift on their worst day.”

The idea was this: Take your attention to a day in the future. It might be 50 years from now, it might be 5 years from now. There’s no way to know. But this day, if you are married, is the last day you will have your spouse here on Earth. 

That will be a day of perfect clarity. You will feel with all the weight what you have lost. And what you will instinctively realize in that moment is that your spouse was always a gift given to you by God. 

Not a perfect soulmate to complete you, not someone to make you happy every day, not a robot that suits every preference you had, but a wonderful, real, live gift given to you by God. To help you grow. To put the gospel on display through unfailing love and forgiveness. To put his faithfulness on display through your continual faithfulness through thick and thin. A gift.

A decade or so into marriage, I admitted defeat. I said, on a random day, “You know if anything ever happened to you, I would walk through our house and absolutely despair over the amount of room left in our trash cans and recycling bin. All that space would make me weep.”

We’ve had some successful negotiations over the thermostat, because now we know how expensive that dreaded four-letter word can be. Still our house is quite crisp, and our bedroom a good 5 degrees colder than the rest of the house, for some unknown reason. And still, there are nights where I will have 3-4 blankets and I’ll look over and she has barely a sheet.

I told you, she is part Eskimo—at least.

But she is not cold-hearted, and her warmth fills our home, cascades onto the small humans trying to find their footing in this world. She once told me I am the oak of our family, and the only response I had was “Well how does it feel to be the sun?”

If something, God forbid, happened to her, I would be what I need to be for our children, of course. But to those who don’t need to stand on me I would fall apart, I tell you, and miss every single one of the things she said I would and more.

I would lay in our bed, trying to get my feet warm, knowing I could just go over and turn it up, but refuse to do so.

I would find every large thing that barely fits in a trash can and affix them just so to have a vision of her looking over her shoulder and saying in her trademark sass, “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”

I don’t often take our marriage for granted, but recently I had one of those particular moments of clarity. We were at a local brewery standing and talking to a group of people. I was standing on a step above her, and in the sunlight I looked down and saw a small strand of grey hair popping up on top of her head.

And the weirdest thing happened. I genuinely had to fight back moisture from my eyes—not because of a grey hair, obviously. But because in that moment the future flashed before my eyes.

The way age slowly asks things of you and then quickly demands them. The relentless march of time. The eventual reality…the eventual quiet meals.

In some ways I’m still a young teenage boy who can’t compute the universe allowing a love like ours to split. It doesn’t seem like oxygen would work the same way, that water would quench and food would fill—it seems that what God has joined together, even death should not separate.

There may be a moment in the future where a child or grandchild picks one of us up and says, “Who were you talking to in there?”

And we might say, “No one.” It could be true and not true at the same time.

There will be a witness still, in that moment—in all of our varied and impossible-to-predict moments of pain.

Shortly after my Grandfather passed away, my Mema hung a painting on the wall behind her kitchen table. I don’t know where she got if from, but I’ll never forget what it says:

“Christ is the head of this house, an unseen guest at every meal.”

I think when I was younger, I thought that was true but not always comforting. Now I know that it is both—immeasurably both.

Now I know that the endings to great loves break us so because they point to a love more faithful, a marriage more lasting, and the eventual healing of every heart belonging to Christ, the unseen guest at so many tables. Not only witness but also savior—he alone able to put someone back in the chair they belong in.

When that day inevitably comes for us, I hope those in our wake marvel at a love for the ages—but most importantly I hope they think of the God our love points to. And that whichever one of us is left will welcome Christ ever more near into the empty chair left behind.

But in the meantime, being no vampire, I will go grab my wife’s hand and hold it.