Because You Loved Me

I have no idea when my love affair with music began. I like to think it was in the delivery room I can almost picture the doctor cranking up his stereo and the rock and roll was blasting out of the speakers. But when I think of my love for music beginning that way I remember my mother was there to so I highly doubt that's where it started. I didn't grow up with a very musical family at all. My mom sang in the church choir but as far as anyone else appreciating music like I do I cannot tell you. I do remember when our family use to go camping when I was a very young girl and I was always trying to sneak up to the pavilion at a certain campground just hoping to get close enough to hear the top 40 songs they would play as the teenagers would dance. I wanted to be sitting next to those speakers it pained me. I could have cared less about the dance I just wanted to hear the music.

As time passed music became even more my safe place. I had a huge stereo in my room that my parents let me use and it had the best bass. I use to crank it up all the time but also got yelled at all the time to turn that down. You would think when you got told all the time to turn it down you would just learn not to crank it but not me. Everyday I would crank and everyday I would get lost in music and lyric. Of course most of the songs I like, I emphasize the word most very lightly, had some meaning to them. They were almost always love songs because I was eager to fall in love, be married to someone I could spend the rest of my life with. I never dreamed of the big wedding just the love part. Having someone there twenty four seven to talk to, cry to, laugh with, have children with, and do the other fun stuff with. I found that when I found Rich although it took us a few years to figure that out. After I met Rich he and I were just friends for almost three years. Weird he would date some girls I knew and then after their "love affair" would fizzle out guess who was there to listen and pick up the pieces of his broken heart. I never thought of Rich as my life partner. Then it started to change as we began hanging out more and more. At first as the friends we had always been and then I don't know how it happened it just did, we fell in love.

I think of our cheesey wedding song, Just you and I by Eddie Rabbit and Crystal Gayle. We both still weep when we hear it or dance to that song. I think of other songs the kids and I, especially Richie because he has my love of music, laugh at Rich for. He is the worst singer and he gets every word, group, song title wrong. We laugh so hard at him! No Rich does not have a love of music as I do but he tolerates it and always says he likes it when I play music. Many times I know he is lying so I just turn it down a little so he can continue to do whatever he is doing. He is a good man!

I have many songs of which I listen to every single day or many times a week. Wilson Phillips-You Won't See Me Cry,  Gloria Estefan- There's Always Tomorrow to name a few. But there is one song that comes to my mind as the #1 song that plays in my head when I think of Rich and music.It is by Celine Dion- Because You Loved Me. I had heard this song many times in the past but after I was really sick and heard this song I made Rich sit down and listen to it as the words showed up on the screen. It was almost like this song, which was written in 1996, was written for us. The chorus in this song is very powerful for me because it says everything I would say to Rich when I was, and after, I was very, very ill and didn't want to go on. It goes like this:

You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I couldn't speak
You were my eyes when I couldn't see
You saw the best there was in me
Lifted me up when I couldn't reach
You gave me faith 'coz you believed
I'm everything I am
Because you loved me

All of these lines were true for me/us. I was very weak, my voice was like a whisper, I couldn't see well at all, Rich always saw the best in me and would tell me, "It will get better." Rich held me up and did everything for me. He continued to tell me to keep my faith not only that I would get better but in God. He plain and simply just loved me when I know I was unlovable. For that I am truly grateful. He proved to me what in sickness and in health really meant. True commitment which could not have been easy at all for him nor do I believe is now as he continues to do all these things for me still five years later.

I hope music is as much of a powerful enjoyment for you as it is for me. Music that makes you laugh. Music that makes you cry. Music that makes you love. Music that takes your breath away. Music that brings back special memories of time gone by. For me it had done all of these in one way or another and I feel blessed because of it!

God Bless You!

Dianne