I am 58 years old. 5 months ago, one of the people I love most in this world died of renal cell carcinoma. (That is kidney cancer, for the uninitiated.) He died 5 years and 2 months from his original diagnosis. He was 50 years old. He was the heart of my heart, the end to my beginning, what made me whole, my world and my love. I miss him.
We were together for 16 years, married for 15 of them, all of them incredible years. We were both married to other people before we found each other; 24 years for me, 11 for him. I was 41 when we met, he was 34 but we had such chemistry, it was off the charts. Age was always "nothin' but a number" in our world. We were perfect together.
When we first got together, we had both left careers and lives behind and we were trying hard to find what fit, what was right for us. We were not doing that together but our individual searches had brought us to the same place, at the same time. Kismet, fate, destiny, Divine Intervention? Could have been any or all. It was just meant to be.
We "met" on a windy beach in Oregon. Back East, we had actually lived within miles of each other. We had been introduced once, 2 years before and again not too long before embarking on our separate journeys. (We both had solid reasons for being on those journeys in the first place, but this is not the time to tell that story.) I knew who he was but I didn't know him. I never asked him about it later on but I am not sure he remembered me at all. So, even though we had crossed paths before Oregon, neither of us had any real concept about the other.
Being 3000 miles from home, a chance meeting with someone from your neighborhood instantly gives you something in common, though, and we became friends almost immediately, once we overcame our initial hesitancy toward each other. When you have been hurt so very, very deeply by someone who is supposed to love you and whom you love, it takes a while to trust yourself with your own feelings again. When you both feel that way, it takes a little longer to dance around the obstacles you've put up for yourself.
Our friendship blossomed into a relationship rather quickly after that initial brief hesitation. The first 2 months we were together (as a couple) we were absolutely inseparable, even though we both knew that it might be temporary. It just felt so good to be close to someone again we both kind of threw caution to the wind. Eventually there would come a time for us to go our separate ways...literally. Me back to the East Coast and him on to Mexico. Those were plans we had set in motion long before we met there on that beach.
When it came time for me to leave, I said to him, "Let's get together when you get back to my part of the country", knowing full well that he was on a personal quest and that he might never come back my way. He said "I really do love you, you know. You will see me again". We promised to try to stay in touch somehow but he was going to be living on a beach in Mexico for the next 4-5 months and then on to who knows where. It seemed like an empty promise.
It took me 4 days to drive back to the East Coast and not a second went by that I didn't think of him. I had let him go, just like that. I was dumbfounded by the emptiness I felt by his absence, so I asked the Universe to bring him back to me someday. I knew I would wait forever for that someday but I fervently hoped that I wouldn't have to wait nearly that long.
Cell phones pretty much didn't exist at that time (hard to believe, I know...) and there had been no way for us to make any kind of contact while we were on the road, so we hadn't spoken at all during those 4 days that I was on the road. I has asked him to write to me when he got to Baja, so that I would know that he had made it there okay and he said he would, so I wasn't surprised when there was already a letter waiting for me when I got home.
It had come the same day I got back and was postmarked in the little town where we had spent that summer together. When I opened it, it was only one paragraph long but the words took my breath away. I will never tell anyone what that letter said. It is too intensely private and personal. But I will tell you that it was the moment that defined the next 16 years of my life and will continue to do so forever. If I never receive another love letter for the rest of my life, that one will be enough.
Of course, after 4 days on the road, driving the 3000 plus miles back to N. C. from Oregon, I was bone weary and in intense need of a hot bath and a cup of tea, just a chance to settle in and try to process what had happened to me in the last 2 months. I was too keyed up to sleep and was just sitting on my bed when the phone rang. It was 2 a.m.
It was Dave. The connection wasn't great and he said he was in a phone booth and sorry that we couldn't hear each other better. I was thrilled to hear from him and asked him if the trip to Baja had been an easy one. There was a moment's heistation and he said that he was not in Mexico, that he was in Texas. I was confused for a minute, thinking something must have gone wrong but when he spoke he said,, "I love you too much to leave you so I am coming home. I'll be there soon as I can get there. Wait for me. You are what I have been searching for and I don't need to look anywhere else. I won't let you go again."
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
