The Missing Scott Chronicles

By Janie Murray Gordon

Jane Gordon had it all: the perfect knight in shining armor, loving, husband for thirty-six years; ten beautiful, adopted children, and a successful career as a nurse practitioner. It all came crashing down when she found Scott dying on their kitchen floor Thanksgiving Eve of 2019. In The Missing Scott Chronicles, she narrates the subsequent nightmare of losing absolutely everything in the heart-wrenching first year without her husband.

This memoir offers a raw and vulnerable chronicle of one woman’s nightmare of grief. Gordon’s perilous and painful journey shares a beautiful, prosaic story of images, thoughts, sounds, and profoundly expressed feelings. In The Missing Scott Chronicles, she pours her heart out, bares her grieving soul, and by sharing, hopefully eases her pain and that of others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Aug 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664239982

Janie Murray Gordon

Janie Murray Gordon, a nurse practitioner, is a single mom of ten after her husband, Scott, died unexpectedly in November of 2019.

Book preview

In Loving Memory

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The fact that you are here, reading this, is not just happenstance. You have been led here to walk this difficult journey with me. My prayer is that my voice will be yours, that my heart will be yours, that my journey will be yours. Some of us have words, and others have other giftings. I want these words to be words of expression and healing for us all.

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Welcome to The Missing Scott Chronicles, where I pour my heart out, bare my grieving soul, and by sharing, hopefully ease my pain and that of others.

Scott Gordon, my love, my life, the other half of the one God made of us, went home to heaven on November 26, 2019. I am praying hard that I will not be a broken mother alone, for he was truly all the best of us both. The pain is crushing, the waves, overwhelming. I often ask God to not make me stay here on earth without him, but little tear-filled eyes are looking up at me for strength, so I must remain strong.

A Tribute to the Life

of Scott Gordon

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Please Be Waiting

Let me live again in your photograph for you are written

forever, an indelible love letter upon my heart.

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Certain swellings of symphonic music, a dog tilting its head in that questioning way. The way the firelight flickers off the wall behind your pillow, awakening for no reason to the sparkle of a moonbeam on the newly fallen snow. The purr of the cat as he tries to settle just right between us, the safety of your huge strong hand always enveloping my small one. I am afraid. I feel bereft. I feel so alone. I cannot speak but in fearful jagging sobs. I hear you, my love, through the screaming cacophony of pain. I can still hear your sweet voice. I wish I did not have to do this even for this flash, this moment, in time. But I know, I believe God is real. Our faith is real. And home is real. I know in heaven there is no marriage or giving in marriage, but for us, my dearest love, I think there must be. Please be waiting there at the gate for me!

Christmas Blessings

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Christmas trees, arms laden with heavy gifts, crystalline flakes sparkling like bits of graphite enveloped me as I drove home from the clinic the evening prior to the celebration of Christ’s birth. I was thinking how odd it was that I could admire the frigid, moonlit beauty one moment, and with just a little curve in the slippery road, suddenly the tectonic plate of my mind shifted. I was looking down into the bleak, cavernous blackness that was now my future.

Pulling over so as to avoid sliding into the abyss, I allowed the writhing spasms of guttural cries to fill the empty cab of the truck that once held our ever-holding hands. The strange dichotomy of that blessed heart anesthesia, disrupted suddenly by the awareness of open-heart surgery’s icy metal tools, made me think of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grieving. I wondered petulantly at the audacity of someone scientifically categorizing the private erratic meanderings of a treacherous broken heart.

Stepping out of the big Tundra truck that had been his dream, my too-large, thrift-store Columbia boots alighted with that scrunching sound that brought me back many years to a paper route on a freezing Minnesota morning, before the dawn broke. Yet the day was already alive with ethereal, bejeweled wonder. It was a strange sensation that awakened in me the realization that my life was coming full circle. Those frigid mornings in the predawn, freezing cold, Ray and I would swear that when we grew up, we would never live in a place like this, Yet here I was, and I was glad I was. But there, at the top of the perimeter of my life’s rotunda, its fragile thread severed and hung low, blown about by the breathless loss as I watched with sadness in my mind’s eye. But as I watched that gossamer ribbon torn and hanging down, it was captured again by a golden thread of grace from the other side. It was tied by the hand of a loving God to the adrift one and sealed into the heart-shaped pattern of my life. My life was not a simple circle of life but a life full of love.

I suddenly realized it was Christmas, the celebration of the Savior’s birth. It was He who had found me that fateful day, the twenty-fifth year of my life, and shortly thereafter made this dreamer’s dreams come true in gifting me with a love that stood strong and beautiful for thirty-six plus years. What a Christmas gift I had been given that day in 1983. Now I must give him back to the One who loves him even more than I.

I became more aware of myself burrowed deep in the arms of this new community, this new family. Covered in handmade quilts and blankets, and comfort shawls, admiring the beautiful ornaments, books, gifts, and heartfelt mementos, I reread the comforting words on piles and piles of cards that spilled over the top of our extra-large coffee table. I tried again to find a place in the overstuffed fridge for yet another home-cooked meal, dessert, and treats embellished with offers of absolutely any need I had being willingly met. I gazed mesmerized, pools of tears blurring the missives, at hundreds of messages on the hypnotic screen of my iPhone. There were words of love, encouragement, and hope. And I knew why Jesus had chosen this place for us when Scott went home. Our little fatherless girls were cocooned in the constant, compassionate embraces of teachers, nurses, coaches, bus drivers, and office staff of an iconic, one-building schoolhouse for grades kindergarten through twelve. Our little white church, sitting with its pretty bell tower pointing proudly to the Savior we love, on a hilltop at the crux of the idyllic little mountain village, became as all church families should, our true family. From the night Scott suddenly closed his eyes forever in my arms, they have never left our side and never left a need unmet or a tear undried. The patients and staff at the clinic—those I was called here to serve, to help, to heal—suddenly turned their benevolent, tender hearts back upon their doctor.

In our earthly family, biology never determined who would make us up. Each member was carefully chosen and grafted into a family made by our loving Lord Jesus. And when our patriarch—the best husband, the best father, the best brother, the best leader, the best friend—was taken home in a moment, in the twinkling of a tearful eye, this family God created came together as few biological families ever will. A depth of love, forgiveness, and loyalty emerged from those who had already suffered so much, and now must suffer again, but never again alone.

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Our Christmas tree, decorated halfway up, waiting for a visit from tall friends.

And what can I say to thank the friends and family from all over the nation, nay, all around the world? You pressed in with calls, cards, gifts, love, and heartfelt words. Included were the extended family, Scott’s high school friends Mary Hsu and Juanita Bunch, and mine. Support poured in from Mother Mary Putney and Terri Schoenburg, old neighbors, coast guard friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, and friends old and new.

No, dear ones, there are no perfect words or words that would bring me back into his warm embrace. But your words have helped. They warm, they comfort, they bring hope, and they love. They say, But you, you are still …

Still what? I don’t know yet. But thank you with all my heart. Just saying, Thank you, is not enough, and this I know well. I should write thank-you notes to you all, but because your numbers are so great, I can’t. Regardless, I hope you know and can sense and feel that the phrase. Thank you, transcends its boundaries from our broken hearts to you all. Dear ones, thank you. And Lord Jesus, thank You for Scott.

In the Twinkling of an Eye

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How life can change in an instant! Just as Jesus said it will be at the end: we will be changed in an instant … in the twinkling of an eye (1 Corinthians 15:52 NKJV). That’s how it was for you, wasn’t it, my darling?

There is an icicle outside the window. Last night it was beautiful—like a crystalline scepter suspended against black velvet, held aloft by a million twinkling stars. But this morning it is small and sad, dripping tears into dirty snow amid a backdrop of endless,