From our Readers:

We have received 4 submissions from Gina.
You can visit her blog here.
She is a recent widow and is doing a phenomenal job of honouring her late husband.
She says:

Journaling just lists a bunch of our private jokes and day-to-day little things that I miss. 

The pic is the one we took just minutes after our engagement.

Over the last four months, I've discovered that the loss of the little things is so much harder to process than the "big picture" ideas. It's the little day-to-day things that hit harder. You know, the little intimacies that are private and exclusive to who you are as a couple, to that relationship as not only husband and wife, but best friends. Things like: the feel of your skin under my hand when I touched your face, as I did several times each day; Gina speak; "boo!" "kitty!"; rubbing my hand through your hair; teasing you about your cute pj's; listening to you breathe beside me in bed each night; your occasional night terrors; waiting what felt like forever for you to finish your shower; that expectant look whenever you made us something new for dinner; your perfectionistic tendencies (over an hour to hang a few pictures? Really?!?); watching you fall asleep sitting up, then deny it; "Which way? Right or left?"; the way you closed your eyes whenever I put the car in reverse; "Do we have time?"; your love of British TV, the history channel, and Hogan's Heroes; listening to you laugh like a loon at Hogan's Heroes in German; anxious repetition of the same darned stuff; the look of concentration on your face when you were futzing about in the war room; your practical jokes; feeling your arms come around me when I was washing the dishes; "Could you use this for your scrapbook?"; "Hey, ooo! How is?"; "It's Rick's world."; your chicken peck typing; singing Sound of Music songs just to get on my nerves; your horrible timing; your inability to "say anything right"; gorilla cheeses; "Go ahead, be a mommy's girl!"; listening to your conversations with Athena each  morning; the sound of your shaver; insisting on fixing things yourself; your total inability to judge time (30 minutes v. 3 hours!); crazy bike rides to God only knows where; you wash, I dry; "Honey, the cat licked my ice!" and other whiny sick bed complaints; my filter; "honey, where's our water?"; the smell of Dunkin' Donuts coffee; missions!; reading oh-so-boring educational materials to you in the car; your patience; your goofy sense of humor; we "acquire"; tighty-whities; the scar on your back that you refused to call a scar; hearing you dress in the dark each morning; forehead kisses and quick pecks; jewelry and Steiff for me, tools and WW2 for you; you unload, I put the groceries away; Gina's hair is everywhere; lit candles; cuckoo clock upkeep and repair; your insistence that I get what I want, but then your resistance to buy what you wanted; "I hear it calling you!"; the search for new members in the land of the misfit Steiff; messages from ebay; laughing at the butt songs; the "sexy" dance; rewriting history and rose-tinted glasses; "ooh...it's silky"; the way you'd laugh while telling a story that wasn't even remotely funny; "The iceberg sunk the Titanic!"; your absolute refusal to tell me what I said after you proposed; game pie; hoarding gifts; no bears left behind; definitely; your tendency to let me win and then play it off like you hadn't; "let me think about it....no."; innovative solutions to the strangest problems; chocolate cat prints and other kitty gifts; 831; how you always took in and tolerated even the most annoying people; the look on your face when we argued; different shades of blue; lists for everything; little things you'd pick up for me here and there, just because; your laugh...there are so many more things to list, but these are the first that cross my mind as I think about our daily lives. My life will never be the same without you. It, and I, are forever changed.