Good morning, Mr. Sunshine

She opened the door and tiptoed outside.

“What are you doing?” I whispered from bed. “You’re going to wake the kids,” I said, referring to our then 13-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son.

“I want to see the sunrise on the beach. I may never get to see it again.”

My first wife, Katri, had been diagnosed with breast cancer four years earlier, and recent check-ups did not bear good news.

The “Teacher” of Ecclesiastes observed that “the sun also rises,” meaning that we come and go, but the sun always rises.

True, and each sunrise is the same.

And each one is different.

That can be a comfort and hope for us, who walk so quickly off the stage of life.

I think my wife was wanting to take a little bit of that sunrise with her, into her future, which was so uncertain.

And the sunrise is splendid in its beauty and magnificent in its constancy.

People suffering from cancer often feel neither beautiful nor magnificent.

She knew something about that.

Since I was fast asleep with the kids, I can only imagine her down there on the beach, her toes in the sand, her eyes fixed on the horizon, swallowing what she could of the sunrise.

Last week, these years later, with my wife, Lori, I wished to return to the beach, early, in hopes of catching a glimpse of Mr. Sunshine.

The sun was scheduled to rise at 6:06 a.m., on Myrtle Beach, Wednesday, June 23, 2016.

I was up at 4:30, just in case the calculations were inaccurate.

And so hand in hand, Lori and I walked along the shore.

“I guess it just gets light,” I complained, disappointed that we seemed to have missed the sunrise. “It’s like God turned on the lights. No warning. No anticipation. No ‘ta-da.’

Maybe the haze hid the sun.”

Checking my watch, I noticed it was only five after six.

Maybe I hadn’t missed it.

And there it was.

Mr. Sunshine was poking his bald, red head above the sea, breaking into the horizon. At first he looked like an egg, struggling to birth himself from the netherworld. Then in only a few minutes, he stood like a warrior with armor, his weapons bright and full and glorious.

We took it all in.

And wished he would have stayed young a bit longer.

For we felt his youth, his vigor, his newness.

It seemed as though the sun brought its own bouquet of freshness. And I wanted to take Mr. Sunshine’s fragrance with me.

Ecclesiastes was right. The sun would be back tomorrow and the next day, and all our days, until I am here no more, until the Lord chooses to return.

“Did you take it in?” I asked Katri as she ever so quietly closed the door so not to wake the kids.

Afraid I would sound blithe if I told her I thought she would see the sunrise again over the ocean and too fearful that she wouldn’t, I said nothing.

Lonely days and lonely nights would follow.

For she was right in her premonition: it was the last time she saw a sunrise on the beach.

At least this side of eternity.

Mom and Dad told me as a child that if I held a seashell next to my ear and waited, I could hear the ocean inside.

It never seemed to work for me.

But then again, I’m not very patient.

So, I would like to think, if I hold a seashell just right, and peer inside, I might catch at least a ray from the face of Mr. Sunshine.

And thereby take some of it home with me.

And with each new, day---each filled with its hopes and fears, each one the same and each, one of a kind, and with every day trotting out a declaration that I will see another day and each one bearing a question mark about tomorrow--- I could yet look inside that shell, and maybe if I look long enough,

I could declare,

“Good morning, Mr. Sunshine.”