One year ago – Joanna & I went out to eat together; then came the phone call that changed our lives 
by Bill Jones

(Scroll to the end for links to my previous 12 blog tributes to Joanna since her passing.)

It was this Saturday last year – on the last weekend of January – that Joanna and I received the phone call from the transplant institute, notifying us that a kidney was available and that Joanna was 1st on the list for it. This was, at first glance, good news, the news for which we had been waiting so long. We believed, hoped, prayed that a new (well, used, actually) kidney would extend Joanna’s life and improve its quality. She would no longer have to go through dialysis every night, as she had for the past 5 years.

As it turned out, though, Joanna’s body had grown weaker over the past 2 years and did not respond well to the surgery. Over the next 2 weeks, she suffered numerous setbacks – including multiple strokes – and passed away at 1:16 a.m. on February 14, two days after her 68th birthday.

Though there are similarities, everyone experiences grief differently. That’s partly because everyone’s experience is different, every health struggle is different, every death is different.

That call from the transplant institute; the aftermath of the surgery; those 2 weeks of ups (yes, there were some “ups”) and downs in the hospital; Joanna’s last day and last night; and the call I received, while driving back to the hospital, telling me that the love of my life was gone – I’ve re-lived every one of these a hundred times or more since her passing. It’s unavoidable; those memories are indelible and will be with me as long as I live.

Saturday, January 30, 2021, began no differently than most Saturdays in our household. Joanna and I almost always went out to lunch on Saturday and frequently followed that with an afternoon of shopping or some other activity before heading home. We loved spending time together . . . we just loved being with each other. So, around 11:30 that morning, Joanna told me that she had a particular craving this day for the Chinese soup dumplings that we both loved so much. She had first introduced me to them on our trip to Hong Kong and Beijing in September 2011. Each little dumpling contains a delicious soup. The trick is to get the dumpling onto your spoon without tearing it and letting the soup escape. Then you hold it up to your mouth and suck out the soup before eating the dumpling. A wonderful delight.

A year or two earlier, Joanna had discovered a restaurant – Wu Wei Din – in Plano, about 15 minutes from our house in Allen, that makes these soup dumplings – and, importantly, to a level that satisfied Joanna’s sophisticated Chinese palate. However, because of COVID, they were serving take-out only at that time. So, Joanna’s plan this Saturday was for us to go there and order the soup dumplings, then eat them in our car. She anticipated my likely objection – why can’t we just bring them home? – and, before I could say a word, insisted that we must eat the dumplings immediately in the car; otherwise, she explained, by the time we got them home, the dumplings would have absorbed the delicious soup.

So she brought utensils, napkins, etc. – she was always prepared! Everything went as planned – we drove over there, she went in and ordered the dumplings and brought them out to the car; then I drove us over to a section of the parking lot that was fairly empty, and we began enjoying our dumplings in relative silence – UNTIL her phone rang. It was the transplant institute calling with the news for which we had been waiting.

It was news that we knew would change our lives – we just didn’t know how it would change our lives. When we left for the hospital at 3:30 the next morning, we never imagined – at least, I certainly didn’t – that she would not be returning to that house in a few days, or ever.

As I said earlier, everyone experiences grief differently. And we all find our own ways to deal with our grief, our own ways to recognize and commemorate milestones, both happy and sad.

This afternoon, I drove over to Wu Wei Din for the first time since that other Saturday 52 weeks ago.

Only this time, instead of Joanna sitting in the passenger seat next to me, I had only pictures of her and me, along with the heart-shaped box containing some of her cremains, as well as her glasses and the pendant containing a few of her cremains and bearing the imprint of Joanna’s thumbprint.

I went in and ordered the soup dumplings, then took them to the car, where I had a napkin and one of Joanna’s Chinese spoons, and I ate the dumplings as I remembered the last time we ate there together, which turned out to be the last time – of thousands, beginning with our first date in Jan. 1973 at the Grubsteak, just off the OBU campus – that we ate out together.

Last April, a few days before we inurned most of Joanna’s cremains in the Columbarium at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, our home church since August 2004, I spoke with our senior pastor, George Mason, on the phone. George told me something that I will never forget . . . he said he believed that Jesus’s death and resurrection had freed Him to be anywhere at any time with anyone, and that he believed that Joanna – now, as he put it, “in Christ’s risenness” – is free to be present in the same way, and that he hoped I would be able to sense Joanna’s presence as I went to the places that we both loved and did the things that we loved doing together and saw people doing the things that Joanna cared about.

I remembered George’s words as I sat there in the car at Wu Wei Din today, and I sensed Joanna’s presence; I talked to her (I talk to her everyday, by the way), told her what I remember of that Saturday at the end of January last year, and how very much I love her and miss her.

I just had to be there today. I can’t explain it. Grief does these things to a person. I went through those last 2 weeks with Joanna – just as we had gone through about everything in life together over the previous 48 years – and their memory is indelibly stamped on my mind. The next 2 weeks will be full of those memories, then I’ll move into my second year without her, and – if the past 12 months are any indication – things aren’t going to get any easier. We had that kind of special marriage marked by a deep love and care for each other, and a little thing like death isn’t going to get in the way of the love we have for each other.

Death . . . hmmm. I know that “passed away” is often regarded as a euphemism for death, a phrase that softens the blow, makes it a little more palatable. But as I’ve read scripture and pondered Joanna’s passing, I’ve come to believe that – for Christians – “passed away” is really more accurate than “death.” Jesus tended to say someone had “fallen asleep.” In Eugene O’Neill’s play, Lazarus Laughed, after Jesus raises Lazarus from his “sleep,” people ask Lazarus what it was like to die. Lazarus replies, “There is no death, really. There is only life. There is only God. There is only incredible joy. Death is not the way it appears from this side. Death is not an abyss into which we go into chaos. It is, rather, a portal through which we move into everlasting life. The one that meets us there is the same generosity that gave us our lives in the beginning, the one who gave us our birth. . . . The grave is as empty as a doorway is empty. There is nothing to fear. . . . There is only life. There is no death.”

So let me amend the last sentence of that previous paragraph: We had that kind of special marriage marked by a deep love and care for each other, and a little thing like Joanna passing into everlasting life isn’t going to get in the way of the love we have for each other. I’ll be there with her – and with Jesus – soon enough.

My previous 12 blog tributes to Joanna since her passing on February 14:

1/14/22 – 11 months of missing Joanna . . . my thoughts go back to another January, 49 years ago
12/14/21 – Ten months after Joanna’s passing . . . music, memories, and lumps in the throat
12/1/21 – 12/1/81, a great day as we became parents for the first time . . . Alison turns 40!
11/14/21 – Journeying with Joanna . . . Photo memories from a half-century (almost) of our travels together
9/14/21 – Pictures, pictures, pictures . . . remembering my wonderful trip with Joanna to Hong Kong, Beijing, and Macao 10 years ago this week
9/4/21 – Joanna and I were married 45 years ago today . . . Missing her and celebrating her
8/14/21 – Six months after Joanna’s passing . . . remembering her humor and all that she meant to me
7/14/21 – Five months after Joanna’s passing . . . remembering the lively soul who brought us joy
6/14/21 – Four months after Joanna’s passing . . . a few personal reflections
3/19/21 – Joanna spoke out against demeaning racial slurs and the fears they caused her as an Asian-American
2/22/21 – How Joanna and I got together . . . the beginning of our love story
2/19/21 – The painful journey that took the love of my life, Joanna . . . to the great heavenly banquet