On Love and Death

Content. Though simple, this was the only word that felt right when we tried to explain our feelings for each other. I felt content with him, whether we were lying in bed listening to a recording of rain sounds on loop or having a late breakfast on lazy mornings.

When I looked at him, my core felt like tangled Christmas lights, when you bring them down from the attic for the holidays, and everything is warm and exciting. It would have been alright with me to lie tucked into his side forever, learning, understanding, existing together. I wondered if I'd known him in a past life, and we had so much in common I sometimes felt he was lying. Being close to him didn’t feel like enough. I wanted to crawl into him, be one body, know what he knew, feel his happiness and his pain. We had spent more time away from each other in the year since we had met, but I felt an intimacy between us that filled a space in my chest.

Daydreaming of living a quiet little life with him on the coast of Ireland, or some such cool, green place, became a secret pastime of mine. There it was, in my mind’s eye: small, single story, ivy snaking up sturdy white walls, thatched roof, large stones inlaid in a path to the door which was flanked by unruly wildflowers of all colors. We would live off of his writing and my garden, which I would tend from early mornings until late afternoon. I saw us selling produce on weekends at farmers’ markets. My crops would be quality and my prices fair, but my customers would stay for his amiable company and conversation. We would sing together on the road home, one of his hands on the wheel and the other holding mine. The sun low on the horizon would wash the white walls of our home the color of a ripe peach. We would walk, hand in hand, up the stone path. If I allowed myself to succumb fully to my romantic visions, I would become overwhelmed with how precious he was to me watch him fumbling with his keys and how he furrowed up his lips in concentration. How beautiful our love was, and how happy he made me. I would raise my hand to his face and hold his cheek gently in my palm for a few seconds, then take his hand in both of mine and as I kiss it, I'd close my eyes, committing this feeling to memory forever. 

His skin was sweet and soft, his cheeks often ruddy and chin stubbly, lips full and dark for his fair skin tone. On nights we spent just listening to music and holding each other, I would run my hands through his hair, remembering the first night we met. He made me smile absentmindedly throughout my days. My feelings for him were so intense sometimes that they welled up in my throat and made my toes dance. I didn't know if I had ever felt so strongly about anything in my life, like he had ignited a force in my soul that had been dormant. Despite all this, something told me this was not a love story, but a tragedy that would leave me cradling my limbs on the ground.

Being with him sometimes hurt, like there was a string tied to my insides, tugging me away from him. I wanted to hold him forever, never letting him go like I knew I would have to, so much sooner than I wanted to. He was sick and had been since birth. Over the next decade - well, truthfully I didn’t know how long and was afraid to ask - he would wither slowly until his heart or lungs failed him. I knew these words, as often as I thought them, should hurt me. I knew I should cry and worry, but I didn’t, not in the way that I thought I should. It was like hearing about the condition of a friend’s husbands’ cousin, or some person far removed. You think, “Wow. That must be so difficult for them. I just can’t imagine,” and then you go about your day without giving it any more thought. I knew my mind was protecting me from not feeling so much, so constantly.

Over the years, through hard times, I have developed an inner coach who reminds me that nothing is worth so much worry. After venting to my friends, I have a habit of ending with “But it’s fine! I’m fine. It’ll work out.” But this time, it wouldn’t just “work out,” and no amount of saying it would make it so. It might even have ended with me in a cozy home with two children at my skirt who embodied our love, but without my companion who occupied such space within me. 

Though I'm not one to want for much, one wish that never left me while we were apart was to see his crooked smile and feel his reassuring pat on my back while I pulled him into an embrace that said, “Please don’t ever leave me to live my life without you.” Sometimes, when so much time passed without seeing him, I felt that I may never see him again. And, this being the thing I dreaded most, I would console myself quickly and put it out of my mind. 

Death has always felt so present in every aspect of life. Even when I looked at my future, the thing that gives me hope like nothing else, there it was, standing smugly amidst my plans. In those daydreams of my future was the boy I had grown to feel I could live out my days with, and death had its arm around his shoulders.

His health was yet another reminder that death walked beside me all the time. Accepting death feels to me like trying to fly or get my head to sprout pink hair instead of my dark brown. As my relatives age, I feel dread in my bones. It's a reminder that I will someday look in the mirror and see an older woman; the path ahead of me will be short, the worn path behind me long.

I carry with me, though, something I heard once: “Aging is a privilege.” Aging was not something he would get to experience, most likely, and I felt selfish for ever believing aging was a bad thing. It was a gift, one that I so wished was mine to give. What a joy it must be to enjoy a loved one for a lifetime, growing together as two branches on one tree. In my most wishful daydreams, I saw us sleeping soundly at each others’ sides, warm and safe under one blanket, hair gray and canes at our bed sides. But when I felt resigned to our fate, my future held children who kept their father’s memory alive: a boy with that same crooked smile and a baby girl with his blue-green eyes, fast asleep in her crib.

As I write this, I am looking at his dark green Irish cap hanging from a framed painting and his grey "writer's sweater" sitting quietly on top of my bookshelf. As of yesterday, he has been gone for eight months. That pink November sunset glowed above the brick wall when his sister called me with the news. I flipped over the last page of our book and read the last line: "Are you sitting?" The birds chirped away from a neighbor's roof while I buried my sobs into my knees.

I still look up to the sky and whisper to him just in case he's listening. In the pitch-black of my room, the ceiling hears my "I miss you so much" and hasn't the decency to say a word back.