tomorrow,
and tomorrow,
and tomorrow,
… to the last syllable of recorded time;

you are gone.

nevertheless, our love endures, is unstoppable

my beautiful,
my sweet,
my beloved

my dear dear sweet
i miss you
the pain
the pain

my dear love

oh, my love

miss you, my dearest

i still don’t understand

i don’t understand

my beloved
cherished by so many

i love you
my most precious

my velvety sweetie

my love
my sweet

Thinking of you with love.

Miss you.

You are so beautiful.

i miss you, my love
everyone misses you

i could write a thousand pages about the hole that is in all of our lives without you here

can we take all of the words written by people in their loss?
all of the requiems,
and the music
and the poetry
and the centuries of beautiful artworks,
the white-knuckled knitting of the mourning,
the edifices erected to memories?
you know — everything?
and press it, squeeze it, distill it
to a single tear of loss?

can we?
i hope not

because that solitary tear would contain molecular bonds of such power that this planet would cease to be

and you would still be missed
by the stars

oh sweetie!
your favorite Prokofiev is on the radio right now
i can see you lighting up and dancing

We note the passing of time
By the memories we make.

A love as great as thine
Leaves behind a heart to break.

oh my sweet

my heart aches

tu es où?

tu me manques
toujours

You should be here and we should be drinking champagne together.

oh the excruciating pain

miss you, my love

peux pas

oh my sweet, i don’t understand life without you

I don’t understand.

This is so wrong.
That you are not here.

I need to see your beautiful face and hear your sonorous voice.

I want to communicate things, but they aren’t things described by words, they are things expressed clearly with music. But I can’t record in this little space.

Yearning.
Always.

My heart yearns for you.

Another year gone by.
Another birth date anniversary to commemorate.
I wonder what you would think about all this. Not just the "big picture" Bizarro World stuff that has happened since you died. Small "stuff" like whether you'd be amused by our continuing to have conversations with you after you've gone ... or how we clean up our language online so that our posts don't get blocked, even though our usual conversations would make Carlin blush.
Well, we miss you.

i don’t understand

You could have been 58 today. But you’re not. You’re still 51.

I try to look back at the year since your last birthday and imagine the life you and I might have lived. Lockdowns? Staying in? Oh, what heaven!!! Yes please. May we have some more?

Other than that bit of obvious, it’s hard to tell what we might have been up to, big-picture-wise.

But I feel sure it would have all been encapsulated and buoyed by our eternal love, and the joy that we found in one another. That love, that joy will never be extinguished, even after I am gone, for we built up an invisible store-house, not just in one another.

Now is when you would look at me and say, “What are you talking about?”
I would take your hand and say, “Trust me.”

And you would. For you love me, without reservation, still. As I do you.

We're thinking of you on your birthday, Mark. Thinking of Carolyn, too. You two were so lovely together.

On your birthday, I was thinking of the time you took us on a tour of a lifeboat in your back yard. So many fun times. I miss sharing silly things like that with you and your dear Carolyn.

There are no words sufficient to express how much I love you and miss your beautiful presence. My most precious, precious sweet.

Thinking of Mark's smarts and his deep love for Carolyn—and Arby’s.

Every morning when I wake
I can’t believe
you are not here
and I am.

my heart yearns for you

oh, my sweet
how I love you

The last software project that Mark worked on, right up until the day that he was too sick to work anymore, was the JWST Exposure Time Calculator (ETC). This is a web application that would be used by all astronomers who want to use the James Webb Space Telescope after its launch, to figure out how much observing time they should ask for in order to do their science.

Mark designed and partially implemented the server, and redesigned part of the web page, before he died in 2015. Since then, we have expanded the server and rewritten part of it, but his basic architecture remains intact.

Yesterday was the proposal deadline for the first year of observations with the Webb Space Telescope. All the astronomers in the world who hoped to be granted time on the Webb had to get their proposals in by 8pm EST on Tuesday Nov 24.

We saw unprecedented load - more than 30,000 calculations on the last day. And the system handled the load.

There were some problems in the last few days, for reasons we don't understand yet. Sometimes messages were backing up in the system instead of being processed until we intervened to fix it. But because of Mark's architecture, the effect of these anomalies was confined to just a few users, instead of slowing down the whole system for everyone.

Thank you, Mark. I so wish you were here to see it.

But the team raised a glass to you, in our post-deadline celebration.

I went to the park today. All the trees and I wept for you. Please come back.

I can’t believe you are gone. I miss you and love you so much.

Oh my beauty. How I love you.

Gary and I regularly treasure at least one tradition you left behind, Saturday afternoon champagne celebrations (for no particular reason) with Carolyn. In sense, when the three of us celebrate, you're there with us.

I can’t believe it’s been 5 years.
There’s so much we would have talked about.

The team members you never met all know who you are.

I miss you.

Its hard to believe its been five years since we've seen you. We miss you - your humor, your sage advice, your compassion. You're forever in our hearts. Paula & Rob

Oh my sweetie, where are you?

Oh my beautiful schwee. Where are you? kisses to you

My heart yearns for you, my sweet.

I still cannot believe you are gone.

I miss you, my beautiful one.