...because when I come and gaze at the fields with you I bring a speaker, and we listen together. I play "Ma Vlast," the song of My Country, for us, which we first heard as part of The Tree of Life soundtrack, and I imagine spinning in the grass with you just as Terrence Malick would imagine it.

Dear Allen, 

September 2016 is the first September since September 2008 that I won’t have you with me. In September 2008, I had just started my last semester of college living in my last Vanderbilt dorm room, dreaming of a man I didn’t know yet and a future in a city yet to be determined. I had just decided to apply to Indiana for grad school. Twelve months later I got to meet you. We met after the first home Colts game of the season on September 13th. I still had a Georgia license plate on my car. I liked you right away, and was so nervous when you told me you were headed back to work after dinner, because I thought you might be trying to get rid of me. Oh honey, you were so sweet, you really did keep very bizarre hours the entire time we were together. I thought the same thing a week later when you wanted to hang out at midnight on a Saturday… but that was just you :-)

We got six more Septembers. The day after labor day in September 2013 we had been living in Michigan for two weeks. I woke up for my first real day of work as a genetic counselor feeling so nauseous that I crankily grumbled at you to go to the store to get medicine for me. You went, you come back, you helped me feel better. And waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, plastered in massive lettering on our living room wall, was your message to me: I am so proud of you. Making you proud is always going to be among the best things I ever do in life. You told me you were proud when I started that job, when I started others, when I quit jobs, whether I succeeded, whether I failed, when I laughed, and when I cried. I hope you’re proud of me now. I was ecstatically proud to be your wife, and remain permanently in awe of you. 

I’m so glad you wanted to meet me. I’m so glad you liked me, that you thought I was funny (I still maintain it was you that made me funny). I’m so glad that you agreed to come over on a Tuesday night two days later to try the brownies I had made which now I know you wouldn’t care for at all. Thanks for saying yes in September, angel. They’re so boring now without you.

Aievelendre, darling. I’ll see you later in our dreams.
​
-your Boguester

In the spirit of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, I invented a new word for us, angel. 

I am so proud and grateful to be able to say that I am Allen Mackey's wife. We met on September 13, 2009 when I was 22 years old and Allen was 26. We eloped in Breckenridge, Colorado on June 20, 2013 when I had just turned 26 and Allen was one day shy of 30. We celebrated our wedding with our friends and family on June 18, 2016. Then, at my age of twenty-nine years old, and his of thirty-three, I said good-bye to my wonderful, kind, dedicated husband on August 19, 2016. I will miss him and love him every day until the end of time. I love you, my sweet angel, my darling sleepy bear.

- Lauren Bogue Mackey, wife of Allen Carr Mackey