Maria

Maria, honestly, you were the first love of my reckless youth. Truly, those other three Maggies were just practice. You were the cheerleader with sunlight in her hair, the girl who knew her heart long before I knew how to hold mine.

We were young, maybe too young, married on a hope and a heartbeat, two kids trying to build a life with nothing but stubbornness and the kind of love that feels like it could outrun time.

But you… you were steady. You were strong in ways I didn’t understand then. Nurse’s hands, mother’s heart, the quiet backbone of a family that grew because you willed it to. Deana, Elizabeth, Nick was your greatest proof that love can shape people who shine.

We made twenty-some years together, and more when you count in the high school days when you seduced me with those bologna, onion, and mayo sandwiches. Years stitched with laughter, arguments, forgiveness, and the kind of ordinary days that become sacred only after they’re gone.

And when it came time for you to ask me to leave, you weren’t cruel; you were right. Some stories aren’t meant to last forever, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t worth living.

Still, I wonder, in the quiet moments, in the places where memory sits heavier than regret, what might have happened if I had been stronger, or wiser, or simply more like you.

But this I know: you were my beginning, my first home, the woman who taught me what partnership looks like even when I didn’t know how to be a partner.

And I carry that. I carry you not as a loss, but as a chapter that shaped the man I eventually became.