A/N:  This is in honor of The Birthday of the one "fairer than most".  Happy Birthday, dearest!  I love you.  Thank you so much for your present - that of your presence.

This is the last of my daily posts, but never fear, this is more love and angst in the works! :)  It'll just come more slowly.  All my dear reviewers, thank you for welcoming me so warmly to Arda!  God bless.

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It’s been 62 years since I said goodbye to you, my dear. And now, soon, I will be saying hello. Do you have any idea how much I’ve longed to say that to you and to hear you say it back? I’m glad I didn’t know how long it would be until I could. I don’t think I could have borne it.

These have been very happy years for me and I have you to thank for that. I only wish you could have been here to complete my joy, but you have always been in my heart and in my thoughts. You have never truly left me. It took me a long time to understand that.

It was that hard in the beginning to stay here without you. All I felt was your absence and it reminded me of all the things I couldn’t do anymore, like seeing your face greet me each morning, making you a cup of tea or one of your favorite omelettes or listening to you read out of your favorite book or giving your brow a kiss goodnight and watching you sleep. All manner of things. Your walking stick remained at the front door, never to be used again, because I wouldn’t, couldn’t move it for a long time. It was waiting for you it seemed and it didn’t seem right to move it as though with it there, it meant you would shortly come out of your bedroom all ready to go on a hike and I’d be right there with you. Same with your pipe. It remained near your chair near the fireplace for a long, long time, waiting for you, not knowing you’d never be back. For a long time the only time I touched your books was to dust them. You were such an avid reader they had never had time to get dusty before and I sure wasn’t going to let them go dusty now. Didn’t seem right that you would never touch them again.

But slowly that huge, gaping hole your departure had left in my heart began to be filled with your presence. You were still there even if my eyes couldn’t see you. My heart saw you. I began to read out of your books and I’d hear your voice. I began to see again your face lit up from within and your smile and your laugh like poured sunshine and the love that always shone from your eyes and voice. And when your smiles and laughter were gone, but your love was stronger than ever, I remembered that too, when it was just you and me and an iron determination to keep all we loved safe, even if we didn’t survive ourselves to see it. Everyday I have honored your sacrifice, my dear, when I look at my children or any of the Shire or my Rose or even in a mirror and see happy faces there, happy because of what you did. I can’t hardly remember the pain; all that remains is your love.

But how many times I’ve wished you were still here physically as well, my dearlove. Mr. Merry and Mr. Pippin and I have never forgotten you or stopped missing and loving you. From our earliest memories we already knew we were in love with you and you with us. I’ve wondered many times why couldn’t we have always been like that - so joyful and carefree, no storm on the horizon or battering our hearts and tearing at our souls, blissfully ignorant that there was even such a thing as evil. Our love for you and yours for us I know never faltered, but why couldn’t the rest have remained the same also? I know what you would say, what Mr. Gandalf said, that everyone who experiences such wishes they could have been spared from it. Or maybe with a teasing smile on your lips, you would repeat my own words back to me and say, There’s nothing for it. I always smile when I think of you smiling. I also think that because of you, my children and everyone in the Shire, do have that same carefree joy because you did not shrink from confronting evil when it did come to us. Yes, you would have wished to have been spared - we certainly wish you had been - but then I think of one of the many reasons I love and admire you that much, my dear: that you did not seek to be spared, that you gave everything so we could have everything. The children you saved the Shire for will continue to thrive there and generations untold after them, all thanks to your great gift to them.