I’ve been churning up old memories lately, regrets, I see this as a cleansing, a purge. I think of it as flushing away some of the poisons, shames and disturbances of the past. It’s a kind of grieving, I think, for my other self, my other life, the things I’ve left behind. I don’t see it as maudlin, I see it as healthy. I have been here before, especially when I am at important points in my spiritual work, it feels like I am stirring up the muck at the bottom of the pond. I think that life is filled with small triumphs, tragedies, joys and sorrows. I think the best books are about those things.
I was thinking this morning of my Beverly, a strong woman, a person who persevered with grace and determination in a very male world to become a senior editor at an influential newspaper. She overcame many obstacles, many of the men she dealt simply could not accept a powerful woman, she was much admired. She did good work, was good to the people who worked for her, had many new and creative ideas to shake up a reactionary and calcified industry.
Beverly never married, never had a family, and she told me one night over drinks at a bar that the reason for that was that she had fallen in love with an editor at a paper where she started out, and had a long and wonderful affair, but he was married with three children and a chronically ill wife, and they both realized the affair was wrong and stopped it.
They never saw one another again, and she never got over it, she said. She was never able to love another man in that way again, so she devoted her life to her work and was successful and creative at several important papers. She worked all the time, and advanced even more rapidly. She became close to nieces and nephews, and they became the family she had given up on. Those kids and her friends. The affair explained he sadness I always felt in her, a distant kind of longing.
We talked often, and whenever I was on book tour in her city, we spent a lot of time together. I loved Beverly myself for a time, I realize now, and I think she cared a lot about me, but I never told her how I felt or let it go further. She didn’t either. I was married also, and I had a child and I couldn’t imagine subjecting her to that again. She probably would not have wanted to. We wrote and e-mailed one another, and some years ago, I was planning to see her on book tour again and both of us were excited to see one another. I meet her at the restaurant where we had agreed to meet, but she didn’t show up, the first time that had ever happened.
I called her apartment and got no answer and left messages for her. I wondered if she had decided that we ought not see one another again. Maybe she had to work late at the paper. I had to leave the city very early the next morning to fly somewhere else, and I picked up a paper at the airport. I read there that Beverly had been struck by a car and killed instantly while walking her dog earlier the day before, four or five hours before we were supposed to meet. The ticket attendant asked me if I was all right, she noticed I was crying, and I felt foolish, standing there in the line bawling. I said I was fine, and got on the plane. The attendants looked at me curiously, perhaps wondering if I was strange or disturbed. They were also nice to me.
I wonder if I should have gotten on that plane? If I should have gone back for her memorial service? I wished we could have said goodbye. As usual, I stayed away from it, making any kind of closure, as they say, impossible. Maybe that’s why Beverly appeared in my dreams last night, as she has before. I wondered for some time if I should have pursued this relationship – been honest about it. Now, in a different relationship, it is no longer relevant, yet it still occurs to me. The sub-conscious is such a fascinating thing, it has a life of its own, sends its own messages. I found love and connection, Beverly did not. And the curious thing is that I want to tell her about me and Maria, I know she would have been happy for me. She always knew I was not happy.
I think I will never know the answers to those questions. It is the nature of life these small mysteries, triumphs, and defeats. In the scheme of things, they always seem so small. Yet they are not.
