Edwin Zimmerman

  Who was Ed?

  He was my beloved, my laughter, my co-conspirator, my protector, my dream collaborator, my ally....my heart.

These are but a tiny top portion of an iceberg that was our life together. The small, visible part. Beneath the surface, that iceberg is so much larger. Its great mass is shipwrecking, and I am its sole surviving inhabitant. To try to articulate who he was is like trying to trap the ocean in a cup and give it to someone else to taste. When the moisture hits their lips, they taste its salt but have no sense of its presence or gravity. No vision of its beauty or rage. No understanding of the life it holds in its depths or... the monsters. So here is that small, insufficient cup.

Ed was beloved to his wife Shawn, our dogs Iva, Ramsey, Jacks and our cat MR. He has friends all over the country that will feel the world is lesser for his loss to it.

  He was a hard worker that took great pride in all that he did and was loved in his workplace as well as by their customers. He was a quiet man with a huge heart who gave hugs that comforted the way a teddy bear reassures a child with its soft, warm embrace, allowing unbidden tears to fall upon its kind face. There wasn’t a dog that he ever met that didn’t like him. Even the mean ones somehow knew he was a friend. He loved them all. We shared a deep love of all animals and appreciation of God’s beauty, signatured all throughout nature.

  He was kind and he loved me. Patient when I was slow to trust and equal in hardheaded, stubbornness to me so as to create a perfect balance. Simply put, he was my home here.

  That is the cup of ocean I give you to sample but there is more to come. Ed knew Jesus. He had allowed Him to heal his deeply broken heart and asked Him to show him God’s ways. He allowed his old nature to be challenged and himself to be changed. This is how I know that I will see him again and look ever forward to that day.