Life is full of perfect moments, sometimes lasting no longer than a song. These moments are like little gems: tiny and shiny and lovely. The trick, I think, is recognizing these gems and stringing them together into a glowing chain that you can tuck away into a secret pocket, as a reminder that you have been blessed.
Tonight, reading, listening to music, laughing with a kindred spirit, I add another little diamond to my chain, and I remember how lucky I am.
Yesterday marked the beginning of a three-week period that I have been quietly dreading for some time now. Easter weekend, one year ago, was the last weekend we spent with Justin.
That Saturday we went to a dinosaur park in the Jura and then took the kids for lunch at Burger King, or as Ben likes to call it, the King of Burgers. It was a lovely day.
Sunday was Easter and we went to the Parc des Bastions with some close family friends. The moms hid Easter treats while the dads distracted the kids, and then after the kids had run around finding their surprises, we sat on the grass and drank Clairette de Die. It was a lovely day.
That Monday morning Justin woke up early and got ready to go to the airport. I told him that if he really wanted me to, I could wake up the kids and we would drive him to the airport. He laughingly told me to stay in bed, so I did. I kissed him goodbye and he left. That was the last time I saw him.
Nineteen days later Betty-Lynn came to my office and told me “Justin passed away last night.” Right at that moment my life fractured into a before and and after, with the time Justin was in Tanzania existing as a kind of interstitial period between the two. That final weekend we spent together as a family, in that city I love so well, remains as my last shiny memory of that glorious before.
I have made it through the first “anniversary” of that weekend. In nineteen days I will make it through the first “anniversary” of his death.
I have survived this. For now, that is enough.
I don’t know exactly when it happened. Maybe one night when you were laying in bed with me while I cried, or maybe one day while I watched you playing with my kids and realized that they love you. Or maybe it was during one of our on-going discussions about the nature of the universe and our perception of the world around us. Perhaps it was well before all of that; perhaps it was on an outing to the movies or the theatre, back when seeing you was the highlight of a week spent in bed pretending my life was not my own. It definitely happened before tonight, when you stripped in front of me and got in the shower with my kids and washed their hair and soaped them down and then handed them back out to me one by one.
In the end, I suppose it doesn’t really matter when it happened: when you became one of the most important persons in our lives, when I allowed you to enter my life and that of my children so completely. What matters is that it happened and that I am grateful that I opened that door to you and you chose to step through it. You have made our lives so much better. You have assuaged our pain and have helped our hearts to heal much more quickly than they would have otherwise. I am also horrified that it happened so soon after I had made the firm decision that I wouldn’t let anyone entwine their life with ours until the children were older and I had regained some of my now-gone patina of indifference.
And there is no way to deny that your life is completely entwined with ours. As an adult, I have never had such an intimate relationship with someone I was not involved with romantically. Once, while almost asleep, you told me that maybe we were soul mates. Another time you said we must have known each other in a past life. I don’t believe in either of those things (and I don’t think you do either), but when I’m with you I almost do because what other explanation could there be for the comfort and ease I feel in your presence?
Anyone who has lost someone she loves dearly must feel that fear of allowing herself to be hurt so deeply again. So while I am not in love with you, I do love you dearly and am aghast that I would have opened myself (and my kids) up to the potential for that kind of pain before the the pain of Justin’s loss has begun to fade. Maybe you are right and women are masochists. Or maybe I should be glad that you came along when you did, before I had managed to close myself off completely to the possibility of opening doors and letting people in. Perhaps this is something I need to add to the list of things you have helped me with: you arrived just in time to keep me from building an impenetrable fortress around us.
What is really strange though, is that the importance you have taken on in my life is certainly less than the importance I have in yours. This is a disequilibrium that I am unaccustomed to in my personal relationships. In some ways it seems to compound the vulnerability that I feel at having let you in all. But I know that by allowing myself to be vulnerable I open myself to all the possibilities that life offers, and to more true and meaningful connections. And after everything that has happened, I have learned the enduring nature and the importance of things that are true and meaningful. I have developed a complete aversion for artifice and insincerity and superficiality, especially in my relations with others. Thus, in order to be true to myself and what I have learned over the past few months (and learning something from all of this is the only way I see to give meaning to something that remains meaningless and inexplicable to me), I must let you in in spite of the fact that you mean more to me than I do to you and that if this whole experiment goes awry I will be devastated.
As I write this, I wonder why I feel compelled to do so. In some ways, this is a continuation of the discussion we had in the car earlier today. I stopped talking because we arrived at our destination, but also because I felt too exposed, as if I had revealed enough of myself to you. That fact that you always hold back a little bit makes it difficult for me open up to you completely. But one of the things I value most highly in our relationship is the honesty we share in the things we do say. And so in the spirit of maintaining that honesty, I am writing these words to you. I may not show them to you tonight, but I will show them to you one day.
Beyond that however, while writing this I am reminded of what Audrey Lorde wrote:
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.
And right now these are the some of things that are most important to me and this is how I choose to work through how I feel and why I have made the choices I’ve made.
I think the final reason for sharing this is that I find it difficult to speak about many of the things that I am feeling right now. My feelings about Justin’s death remain, almost a year later, too painful for me to verbalize most of the time. But I hope to be able to talk about those thing soon and so I am priming the pump by sharing this with you now in the hope that some of the other things that I would like to say will follow.
Death is about loss: a statement so obvious it almost doesn’t bear uttering, let alone committing to paper. But until I experienced for myself a profound loss, I didn’t understand how pervasive this loss could be.
When I learned of Justin’s death, I knew immediately I had lost my husband. I soon realized I had also lost the life we had together, as well as the future life we had hoped to one day have. Our path together, which I had always envisioned as a bucolic road rolling towards a distant sunset, disappeared the instant he died.
But these are the obvious things; the things I could have predicted I would lose. There were other losses that I would never have imagined. My guilt over living on robbed me of the ability to do certain things I loved, especially things he had also loved. It is as though his inability to do these things and derive joy from them prevented me from doing them also, lest I experience a joy that he would never experience.
That is how I lost reading. I was always an avid reader, voraciously consuming everything from voluminous tomes to product labels. But after he died I was unable to read more than a few sentences. I would very quickly think “Jus would love this”, then immediately realize he couldn’t/wouldn’t and I would have to stop. And so it went for some time. Eventually I started reading again, but always books I knew he would scoff at, were he around to do so. These books were not what really I wanted to read, but at least I didn’t have to suffer the guilt of reading (much less enjoying!) something he would have wanted to read.
Until today. Today I read an essay on writing by Susan Sontag. It was delicious. It made me smile. It made me want to read and write and submerge myself in words. And not once while I was reading it did I think of Justin or feel guilty that he would never enjoy those words. I simply revelled in the joy of reading, made even more sweet by its long absence.
Death is about loss. But today I understood that it is also about what you (re)discover once you stop reeling from the pain of what is gone. I know it’s still early days for me, but today gave me hope that I might not have lost myself entirely or that if I did, I may one day be found.
J.R., I feared that my guilt and sadness would keep me from my beloved books forever. Melodramatic, I know, but it’s how I felt. But your contagious love of reading rekindled my own. So I will add this to the long list of things for which I am grateful to you. Thank you. Again.
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