Maria and I are restless sleepers. We both usually wake up around 3 a.m., and this morning, Maria recalls, I turned to her in the night and said “we both mesh so well together.” I don’t really remember saying it, but I often think it and feel it, especially when I wake up and we are wrapped so comfortably and closely together.
It was curiously phrased, as nighttime mumbles often are, but it expressed something that is true. We do mesh well together, two people who have not always meshed with others.
Maria said my comment touched her, she said she realized how true what I said was, how well we fit with one another and belonged together. She said she realized that she was not lonely any more, and she realized that she had been lonely her whole life.
When she told me about this, I said I only vaguely remembered talking to her, but what she said was true for me. I have also been lonely all my life as well, and am not lonely any more. And I believe that no matter what happens to use I will never be lonely again.
I think the elephant in the room for us is often my age, and in the interests of authenticity, I should address it. I am 17 years older than Maria, and she has so much energy and creativity and spark and life in her that I sometimes feel even older.
Her love of life inspires and motivates me. She is almost often laughing (when she is not crying), and has the playfulness of a teenager. I don’t think I have ever been playful, even as a teenager, but I love being around someone who is.
If you play the odds, as insurers and gamblers do, then the most likely outcome is that I will die long before her. You never know, life is not predictable. But the thing about the odds is that they are usually right. This means she will probably live a long time without me. I think we are both afraid of that, and for different reasons.
On one of my dark days and in one of my evil moods, I mused out loud one night about the two of us jumping off a bridge together if things got difficult and we ever have to be separated or had to leave one another. And I so loved her answer as she looked at me incredulously: “what are you kidding? Give up my work?”
I think I knew at that moment that she would be all right.
My own feelings about loss and grief are complex and unusual, I know. Many people are drawn to mourning. Our culture hides from death, and it always seems a horrible shock to people.
If you look on Facebook, some are also drawn to grieving in the open and for a long time. There is nothing wrong with that, it just seems alien to me. Grief is not a choice, one cannot will it away. But how we live our lives is a choice, and I have something to say about how see myself.
I’ve been doing hospice and therapy work with dogs for a decade now, and that work has taught me that while death is sad, it can also be beautiful and meaningful. The more people think about it the better death they seem to have. We will all die and lose the ones we love, and the ones we love will lose us, all of us. But you don’t have to disappear when you die.
I told Maria what I believe, and that is this. When you find powerful love and connection, I don’t believe it every really can be compleetey lost. You can never be lonely again in the same way, you have that kind of life and connection in your consciousness. It does not die.
I have a wonderful student who lost a very beloved husband some years ago, and has mourned him deeply.
She has started writing the most beautiful poetry about life, and has shown me wonderful journals she has kept all of this years. I see that her husband is not gone, he is very present in her life and soul every day. And she is moving on, filling up her life with friendship, creativity, family and community.
Is that enough? I don’t know, and she doesn’t know either. I suppose that is up to her.
I am beginning to be old, and I will not speak poorly of age, age has brought me riches beyond the imagination of the young. When people start to get old, they begin to review their lives, to settle up and sum up what their lives have meant. This, I think is a preparation for death, the subconscious pulling itself together for the end of life. It can be a lament or an affirmation, that is up to us.
Maria will always be a part of me, and I believe I will always be a part of her. Our lives, I told her, are about second chapters, and I believe she will have a rich second chapter, either with someone else or by herself, she can do it either way. I can’t imagine how either of us could lose the other and give up on my life, we never did when we could have so easily.
I will not lie, I do worry about what will happen to Maria if and when I die before her, and even as I know she is fully capable to taking care of herself. I hate to think of her grieving and lonely, and perhaps that is why I feel the way I do about death and dying.
But loneliness, unlike grieving, is a state of mind, as well as a reality for some, and if Maria were to go before me, I know at least that I can love and be loved, that it is out there in the world if I am open to it. I never thought it was possible, and sometimes being with people can be the loneliest place in the world to be.
I was worried when we got married that Maria might regret marrying an older man as my legs stiffened and my memory sometimes flagged and my visits to the pharmacy picked up. But I was wrong about that. Our love and commitment to one another has only grown. We mesh well with one another, and that kind of love does not seem to disappear, there is so much room for it to grow.
I do not believe either of us can ever be truly lonely again.
I hope Maria comes to see – it is up to her, she is very much of her own mind – that what happened between us, that our unflagging and deepening love and support for one another – without which I, for one, would not be alive today – will not evaporate or vanish with death. Bodies die, but spirit and memory doesn’t. We will both always be a presence in the lives of the other. We are a part of one another.
I have lost a number of people in my life that I have loved (including two children, and a young woman I almost married when I was 20 years old, she died of a brain tumor) and they are not gone, but with me still.
Grief is one thing, loneliness is another. I would be devastated if Maria were to die before me, but I very sincerely believe she would not be gone from my life. I hope I would live my life, that is what we are all about.
The feeling of connection she and I spoke about in the night is transformative.
We both know now what love feels like, and we both found it.
And if we found it on a remote hillside in the tiny hamlet of West Hebron, N.Y., we can find it anywhere.
We may not need to find it in the form of another human being, I don’t really know. Maria is not one of those women (or men) who would permit a relationship with a man to define her.
I think the real gift of true love is that the people who experience it will never be alone again. Not ever.
