IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH. TIL DEATH DO YOU PART.
THESE WORDS, ALWAYS SOLEMN, ARE VERY DIFFERENT DEPENDING ON WHEN YOU UTTER THEM TO YOUR PARTNER: IN YOUTH, WHEN YOU ARE UN- OR LESS-TRIED? OR LATER, PERHAPS MUCH LATER, AFTER LIFE HAS BEATEN YOU UP A FEW TIMES?
THIS IS MY HEARTFELT VALENTINE TO LATE-LIFE LOVE.
I wrote the story which follows in 2016.
At that time, Mark Graff and I were dating each other, deeply smitten but uncertain as to the nature of our long-term commitment. Or even if there would be one.
Hence, out of respect for both our process as it might or might not unfold, as well as to protect his privacy, I did not identify him. I simply called him “my guy.”
Things have changed since then.
The two of us, in the primary colors of early love, 2014.
This story was intimate, dealing with the first medical crisis we faced together, so privacy-protection was especially important. It was his crisis; he did not want to appear weak or vulnerable; he felt illness stated publicly might be seen that way.
But it was also “our” crisis. And navigating how we would handle it, in our then-still-newish relationship, proved to be part of developing that relationship.
When young, healthy people (many of whom have not yet had time to face the more severe testings life will eventually throw their way), marry, the vows they speak concerning the more dire possibilities usually seem remote. (Though if they stay together, at some point, the forbidding, often unexpected, realities of life will surface, as they do in all lives, and though time, which seems more stately in its pace when young, begins to hurtle past as one ages: One minute a person is 22, then, what feels like fifteen minutes later, she is getting letters telling her she’s eligible for Medicare.)
But when older people commit, those dire possibilities are right there.
Mark and I were in our sixties when we met. I had been widowed, twice; he had had a wife with an inoperable central nervous system cancer, a child with a congenital heart defect; he’d had a stent placed in his own heart years earlier.
When, five and a half years into our relationship (and three years after I wrote this article), he proposed marriage and I accepted, we knew what we were getting into — if not the specifics, than the general outlines.
We announced our engagement to a few close friends, in November, 2019.
Strangely, this hard knowledge is not entirely grim. In some aspects, it plays out beneficially.
As I said in another story I wrote, for AARP Magazine, Sex as a Death-Defying Act, “Sex when you’re older… Experience, history, mortality are in bed with you… In later life, you know one of you almost certainly dies first. This intensifies every caress.”
I don’t take one moment as certainly granted. I don’t think he does, either.
Since the time I wrote Love in the Time of Cardio, Mark has gone through a knee replacement and surgery from cervical spinal stenosis, with me as his caregiver.
I’ve had a reverse total shoulder replacement, and he cared for me. Because it was my right shoulder (I’m right handed) it proved much more labor intensive than we had imagined. I couldn’t drive, chop vegetables, nor open an oven with one hand and remove a casserole with the other. Without assistance I couldn’t put on or remove a bra, or affix the very tedious shoe-box-sized “immobilizer sling” I was supposed to wear for six weeks, or fill and put on the shoulder-covering ice-jacket thing that reduces the swelling.
Me, post shoulder-surgery, bundled up to go out for a brief, careful walk in cold weather. Mark did the bundling, including zipping the coat and putting on the sling.
Tenderness, connection, patience, finding the best in yourself even when you feel grouchy, exhausted, or in pain… I suppose most people who are coupled at least aspire towards these things.
But over time you get tested. These aspirational qualities get expanded, played with; they enlarge and contract, as illness and many other life-circumstances come into play.
Sometimes circumstances grow overwhelming. Compassion gets tinged by loss. Grief, fear and tiredness make affection and equipoise lie down (chronic conditions are particularly wearying).
But then, if you stick with it, love flames back up again, vitalized by intimacy, discovery and the strength derived from having made it through difficulty.
Falling in love may be miraculous, but, when it happens, it is also simple. Heavy-duty attraction is evident and, at first, unambivalent, clear. As love expands over time, it moves from early love’s primary colors to a palette with uncountable resonant shades and hues, subtle as well as vibrant, with which the lovers/partners paint their one-of-a-kind shared life. As they age, should they both live into elderhood, each grows aware that there will be a non-negotiable end, though not its specifics.
This Valentine’s Day, I celebrate this aspect of love: the caring by one person for another, at the moment when one is not one’s whole, healthy, best self. Champagne, gifts, chocolate, the special night out, jewelry, perfume, trips, lingerie: sure, all these tropes of romance have played a part in Mark’s and my journey (yes, lingerie can be worn when one is north of 65). But so has the ever-present knowledge of death.
Mark changed the dressing on the horrific-looking scar on my shoulder. “Perfect scar,” he said the first time, with great satisfaction. “Healing beautifully.” (He could have been a surgeon, I think, as he does. He has the analytic cool and interest in how things, including bodies, work.) Though I had said I wouldn’t look at it, I glanced in the mirror. I was shocked to see not only the scar, but that my entire right breast was empurpled with bruising. The doctor had not mentioned this part to me. Dizzy and horrified, I sat down.
But what did Mark do? After he had the wound re-bandaged and had carefully, carefully helped me into a long gray bathrobe and the immobilizer?
Looking me in the eye, he slipped one hand in the top of the robe and cupped one breast. A then-38D, 67- year old breast. Even when unbruised, that breast softened long ago to gravity. Then he closed his eyes for a second in pure pleasure and appreciation, then opened those eyes (gray-blue) again. “I love these little breasts,” he said. “I love this little body.” By which, I heard, “I love and desire you, even when you are wounded. I’m keeping the faith that you will heal.”
“Little,” let us understand, was a term of endearment here.
This is how love looks to me now, nine years into it with Mark, and twenty-two years after being widowed from the first great love of my life, with one serious relationship (also ended by death) in between. But love now, with Mark, at the infancy of old age, is dimensional. It is tinged with lust, care, reassurance, fondness, commitment, silliness. Its foundation is respect, admiration.
This is love that, even when knowing the eventual certain outcome, makes a person say, yes.
Yes, this is worth it.
“Is that your heart, or mine?”
Here is when it began: a little after one in the morning.
Here is where: in my bed, in Vermont, with my guy. I’m curled into him, my head resting on his shoulder, sleepy, happy.
He says, “Mine.”
I say, “Wow, it’s beating awfully fast, and hard.”
I’m the one who first suggests a trip to the emergency room might be in order. After about ten minutes of back and forth, he agrees.
New Hampshire, across the river… this was the view from his ICU room
This is so uncharacteristic of him — to agree that he might need help and does not have it all under control — that I get frightened for the first time.
The moon is bright. The drive takes about 40 minutes. My night vision is not great. I’m wearing glasses instead of my contacts. Yellow signs and white signs have huge glowing auras. I know the route well. The sleepiness in which I’d floated before has fled. I’m wide awake.
We have the “it’s probably nothing” conversation at least twenty times between my home and Brattleboro Memorial Hospital.
I think, he may actually believe it’s probably nothing. And since he is the hyper-rational, science-and-data-based one, if he says it’s probably nothing, maybe it is.
But maybe it’s something.
For sure it’s something enough that I am driving him down 91 in the middle of the night.
I wait as he fills out paperwork. Wait for him to be called.
“Do you want me to come in with you?”
He hesitates. “Well, I think you’d probably feel better if you did, but I’d probably feel better if I went in by myself.”
I say, and I hate being so grown-up that I know that I must give this answer, because it is the answer that adults afford each other, “Well, it’s your body and your health. Whatever makes you feel better is what you need to do.”
Pretty soon the night nurse, a slight guy with reddish-blonde hair, wearing blue scrubs, comes out for him. They disappear behind double doors.
I am sitting on a small bench padded in blue leatherette. Across from me, on an identical bench, is a twenty-ish woman, hair shaved on one side, in a long blonde ponytail with a seaweed-like green streak on the other. I have no idea why she is here or when she arrived. Her fingers are madly busy on her phone. Every time she sends or receives a text her phone gives a loud watery self-important blurp, every 25 or 30 seconds.
It is now 2:54 a.m.
I am trying to read on my Kindle. I alternate between being too worried, too tired and too distracted by the every-few-seconds blurp of the cell phone to concentrate.
Finally I say, “Excuse me, would you mind muting your cell phone, please?”
She gazes at me blankly. “Volume button’s busted,” she says. “Sorry,” she adds, aggressively.
Eventually I curl up in a scrunched fetal position on the blue bench and sleep, briefly. Time changes shape. How long have I been here? Why haven’t they come and gotten me?
When I wake up the cell-phone user is gone. I read a little more. A book on Marcus Aurelius, which quotes, among others who use difficulty as an opportunity for growth and personal development (as I myself espouse, and generally practice), Benjamin Franklin: “The things which hurt, instruct.”
But tonight instead of “Right on,” I think, fuck this.
Eventually the male nurse in blue scrubs comes back through the door. “You can go in now.”
My guy looks remarkably relaxed. He’s on a gurney, in jeans and running shoes and an idiotic pale green hospital gown. There’s a needle in his arm. Electrodes polka dot his chest, attaching him to a monitor whose numbers keep changing. This cubicle approximates a room by virtue of curtains on a track and heavy sliding glass doors which can be pulled shut. These mostly keep out the sound of the man who is raving loudly inside another ER room, that one guarded by two state troopers.
The first thing my guy says to me is, “I told them to let you in twenty minutes ago.”
The second thing he says is, “Evidently I am having my first episode of atrial fibrillation.”
His hand, over mine. He likes being protective of me; when he is vulnerable physically, the terms, at least temporarily, must be rewritten. Not easy for either of us!
There is another outburst from the man down the hall (“How long have I fucking been here? No man, how long? 24 hours? Arrrrgggh, I… what the… what the FUCKing cocksucking, what are you —?”).
The third thing my guy says, in reference to the raving man, is “Someone is having a worse day than I am.”
The fourth thing he says is, “I wish I could see the numbers, that would make me feel a lot better.”
He can’t see them, because the monitor is above and behind his head. I don’t know that they would make him feel better. I watch the numbers on his heartbeat jump every few seconds: 100, 141, 153, 122, 139, 110, 144.
The fifth thing he says is, “I’m actually not worried. I know you are, but I’m not. This is harder on you than on me. ”
Hours pass.
The male nurse comes and goes, checking numbers. He gives me a detailed explanation of “A-Fib.” He explains the condition both in general and relative to my guy’s “episode.” They’ve given my guy a drug to regularize his heart rate and blood pressure (which is trying dangerously hard to compensate for his irregular heartbeat); it’s not working. Plans B, C, and D are discussed. I understand some of this. My guy understands more; he’s dealt with medical stuff and heart stuff. He continues to appear sanguine.
A different nurse comes in. “Who is your regular doctor?” A look passes between me and my guy. He says, “Well, I don’t have a regular doctor in Vermont, I’m up here visiting her. My regular doctor is in New York.”
Alone again, he tells me, “This is harder on you than me. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing to worry about. The worst thing is, I’m getting really hungry.”
Yet another nurse, female, comes in. I say to her, a little sternly, “Is there anything we can get him to eat? There are blood sugar issues.”
‘How about bread and peanut butter?” she offers.
About fifteen minutes later, a slice of bread with peanut butter arrives. I try, unsuccessfully, not to notice that it is white bread with hydrogenated peanut butter.
Both are foods I would never eat, nor feed someone I love.
A doctor arrives: likable, tidy, compact, spare, wearing a turquoise blue turtleneck and buttoned turquoise blue jacket. She radiates both competence and compassion, is clearly no-nonsense. “Tell me what happened,” she says.
A portrait of us by Andrew Kilgore, maybe two years into our relationship.
He begins, “Well, we were lying in bed, it was a little after one in the morning, after some hanky-panky —” and continues.
This doctor seems to me to underline that what is happening is not something to take lightly. She is calm and serious. Blood clots are mentioned. Stroke risk. The electrical impulses of various chambers of the heart. What compensates for what. Various medications and options; side effects.
I follow some of this, and am as alarmed as my guy, who seems to follow all of it, conversing with the doctor, appears not to be.
“If we don’t get this normalized we may have to keep you in the hospital for three or four days, for observation. Probably we are going to move you to the intensive care unit.” She explains that this way, certain drugs could be administered immediately in the event of an emergency, whereas “on the floor” it would take longer.
“We wouldn’t be putting you there because you’re right at death’s door,” she says, “because you’re not, so don’t worry.”
A second drug is administered by the male nurse in the blue scrubs. My guy’s heart rate keeps jumping around, but now the jumps sometimes go below 100. 77, 81, 99, 108, 80.
I say to him, during one of the intervals we are alone, “Hanky-panky? You call what we did hanky-panky?” Meaning, don’t you think that what passed between us was a little intense to be so described? Isn’t that trivializing it?
Not seeing what lies ahead clearly; does uncertainty have its own beauty?
I am teasing, taking his mind off our – his – circumstances.
But I’m also serious: it does trivialize it, makes what was in fact incendiary sound geezerish.
And under all this, the back-beat: what if I have to do without that now, what if that was the last time, what if what if what if?
To the next professional who asks him what happens, he says, “We had just finished making love, and…”
Still a little soft-pedaled and vanilla for what went down between us. But I recognize and appreciate the gesture.
Time passes.
He says to me, “Look, this — ” gesturing at curtain, IV, monitor, “is a different experience for you than me. I get that.” And for the third time: “It’s harder on you than on me.”
I think he believes this. Maybe he’s right. But maybe he’s just putting up a good front to make me feel better.
It is light by the time he is moved up to ICU.
By the time I’m let into his private room there, he is wearing only a hospital gown and ill-fitting beige socks, which ride, wrinkled, around his ankles; the stupid hospital socks with the ridiculous non-slip white plastic dots on the soles.
We both know how undignified this looks, so neither of us says a word about it.
When the daytime duty nurse, Ekaterina, comes in, he asks her to turn the monitor so he can see it. Once he can see the data, he is, indeed, happier.
We agree that if this had to happen, better that it happen here, in Vermont, with me.
I note the regal maple tree right outside the window. The view of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, just across the river.
That maple; looking down on it.
In Vermont, people like to say, “The best thing about New Hampshire is looking at it.”
I lie down next to him in the narrow bed. My head on his shoulder. His heart is still beating so very hard and fast. We semi-doze a little. Eventually he asks me to move to the blue chair next to the bed.
Eventually he asks me to move back next to him. Again, my head on his shoulder, his arm around me, his heart still beating so very hard and fast.
Various other doctors and nurses come and go and ask questions, mostly the same ones.
He says, “I don’t even like to imagine you putting this on Facebook. Be careful what you say, okay? The last thing I want is a bunch of people I don’t know discussing my health and weighing in on the diagnosis and telling me what they think I ought to do and ‘Oh, my brother-in-law had A-Fib and he took such-and-such a supplement and stopped drinking and he’s all better now.’ Or, ‘But he didn’t make it.’ ”
He pauses for a second, then adds, “But I fell in love with a writer. I realize you have to write. And your experience of this is your experience, not mine.”
Breakfast is brought to him.
The house in which I then lived; the beauty to which I came home, first the pond and then the house.
I am told to leave, get some sleep, and come back around 3:00. “Most likely we’ll release him today, barring anything unforeseen.”
He says, “I’m still your big strong guy, you know.”
It is 9:31 a.m., very sunny. I drive home.
On the way, I recall how, during our first months together, he told me about walking to the subway under a temporary protective awning by a construction site.
He said that a large piece of building material crashed onto the awning, so loudly he nearly jumped out of his skin. “And you know what my first thought was?” he asked me. ” It was, ‘This cannot happen to her again.’ ”
He knew, of course, about the time I went into another emergency room a wife, and left a widow.
No one gets out of life alive, but some of us really know this.
On the way home from Brattleboro Memorial I think: “Do I really need another lesson in ‘love the moment you have, because that – the moment and love – is all we ever have’?”
On the way home I think: “Oh dragon, is there anything in life, ever, ever, that teaches or illuminates anything else lasting except this?”
On the way home I think: “Maybe he’s right, this might be a different experience for each of us.”
On the way home I recall my own episode of much milder A-Fib, which happened for several months following my mother’s death.
I recall how terrifying it was when my heart would suddenly beat like mad, how I’d fake my way through conversations, as if there wasn’t this thing happening inside my chest. I was assured by my general physician, two friends who’d had it, and finally a cardiologist that this was an annoyance, not a danger, and that it might come and go for awhile, or I might have to live with it, but not to worry.
Eventually, it stopped happening.
But my numbers were nowhere near as dramatic as his. Mine was sub-clincal. I never had to be medicated, or go to the ER.
But maybe he’s right, it’s no big deal.
On the way home I think: even if it’s no big deal for him, it’s big to me.
I get home, eat some cereal, fall into a bottomless sleep as sun streams in the window.
At about 2:00 pm he calls. He tells me that just as they were wheeling in equipment for an electrocardiogram, his heartbeat returned, suddenly and completely, to normal.
“They’re letting me go,” he says. “Come pick me up. But don’t rush, discharges always take a ridiculously long time.”
He says, “And by the way, they can’t tell me what caused it. They said it may never happen again, but if it does it’ll just be a nuisance, it’s not going to affect my longevity expectation. And they also said I can keep drinking coffee.”
I had never said a word to him about his coffee intake. I had cheerfully bought a Chemex, carefully chose and ground the beans whenever he was coming to visit, the better to make his coffee pleasurable. How did he know, then, that I even as I poured it, I had wondered if it was excessive?
I knew after this experience I would need to order a heart rate monitor on stand by in-case he felt dizzy or nauseous. Late one evening a couple of days later, I went online and began reading a few sites. One stood out to me, but I needed some extra reassurance before I hit the ‘Buy Now’ button. So I kept searching to see if I could find any other reviews.
That I would be looking for a heart-rate monitor and find one I considered “promising” was itself troubling.
I took a shower before driving back to the hospital. I finished with cold water, to shake off the minimal sleep and disorientation.
I remembered the most recent time I had picked him up, not at the hospital but at the train station in Bellows Falls, Vermont, only two days earlier, when he’d come up from New York. He had texted me, “Wear a skirt.” Although texts are not auditory, I could hear the growl in that directive.
And loved it. (His being able to issue directives to me in this area, and my delighted receipt of same, is, I feel the need to say, consensual. Discussed before we acted on it.)
And I’d worn a skirt to meet him at the train station.
I knew, regardless of how healthy it turned out he was or wasn’t, that given our dynamic and who he was, he would hate me acting nurse-y, bossy, concerned about his health. I knew that asking him every second how he was and if he felt okay and if he needed anything would drive him around the bend.
I got out of the cold shower, toweled off.
I put on a dress, and heels, and lipstick.
I drove off to whatever was next.
That night, afterwards, again in our bed, we again did whatever the word is for what we do.
Winter, 2019, in Evergreen, Colorado.
Afterwards, he opened his arm, and I again curled up next to him, my head on his shoulder.
His metaphorical heart and mine had remained recognizable to me throughout, as was my surety that whatever the outcome, even the one that most terrified me, even knowing that to open one’s heart sooner or later means that life will smash it wide open on jagged rocks, it was worth it to love and be loved by this man, for however long we had.
I was so grateful that we had more time.
“Not ‘I love you,’ ” Ram Dass once said, “But ‘You take me to that place in myself where I am love.'”
However much we love another person, we do not and never can “become one” with them (which “one” would that be, anyway?).
The essence of human love, it seems to me, is that that other person is other: different, wondrous, curious, exasperating, adored.
Love is, among so much else, our protest against and our effort to bridge this immutable separateness. A separateness most clearly proved by mortality, or even a middle-of the-night brush against it (as I saw it) or a middle-of the-night inconvenient health scare that looked like a brush with mortality to a beloved girlfriend (as he saw it).
Call it a heartfelt difference.
Differences which, as we later deconstructed it, we viewed with respect for the other.
I lay there that night, my head on his shoulder.
Listening to his heart, not mine. His heart, not mine. I heard it at last, normally, beautifully beating.
The view from my home, taken a day or two before all this. A day which couldn’t decide whether it was rainy or sunny.
This blog-post / essay is part of Crescent Dragonwagon’s memoiristic Nothing Is Wasted on the Writer series, in which she explores using the events of one’s own life as, at least in part, material for one’s writing. Sometimes she explicitly discusses this process; sometimes, as in this story, she just dives in.
“You ask how I did it.” said Dragonwagon, in an email responding to an admiring writing student as the time Love in the Time of Cardio was first published. “I felt compelled. Just had to write it. What that brush with mortality woke in me was so powerful I had no choice, it demanded that I write it, immediately. I did it within 24 hours of his actual hospital stay. If I hadn’t I never would have remembered details, like the green-ponytailed girl in the ER waiting room whose phone kept annoying me, or the peanut butter and my inward reaction to it, if I had waited. Carpe diem, baby!”
Speaking of seizing the day… how do you love your days, even the drag-down tough ones, even during troubled and chaotic political and social times? How Do You Love Your Days is a series of 90 minute online classes Crescent will be teaching throughout 2020, which explore this. On March 22, 2020, at 2 PM Central, she’ll offer the Spring Equinox Edition, which focuses on reinvention.
If you would like to study writing with Crescent, her next 10-class Tuesdays with Crescent series begins on February 18th, 2020. You can learn about what TwC is like, complete with a Facebook live video on the topic, here. Register here.
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I just… love you.
And I, as you well know, YOU, Tori. We still remember, with such joy, you and Mary patting him so fondly!
Thank you, Crescent… lovely post, thoughtful with those quick flashes of humor and something else that pierces, just so. Happy to hear your pleasure dome still resounds (regularly).
muchmuch love,
M.
Thank you, Mysti. May yours resound as well… We’ve walked through some rugged terrain, haven’t we?
In recent times I’ve come to the conclusion if there’s a purpose in life it’s that we’re here to experience and testify to that experience and the emotions that go with it. Dear Dragon, you have testified in multiples. I hope you do not need to testify again for a long time. Speedy healing for SALM(on).
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Richard. I’ve come to a similar conclusion, reluctantly (brought there by ongoing hesitations as the finger hovers over the “publish” button — too personal? Too private? Too this, too that, what if?… And then I do, and it turns out to have meaning to others).
What I think these days is, if one “testifies” transparently enough, others see themselves through you, like glass.
I like your hope for me and concur!
xxxoo
Yes, it “testifies” to others. *sigh*. Thank you, Crescent.
And thank you, Lesley… it only testifies to those whose life experience has allowed them to hear it. I’m sorry you are one, but glad to be heard. This life!
So raw and beautiful and true. Thank you for this. I’m happy you’ve found such serenity with this obviously special man.
Thanks, Talya. xxxxxooooo
You brought tears to my eyes… it’s beautiful – the special relationship with your love. I am so glad you are happy!
It’s hard to embrace those dress rehearsals for change. Maybe living happily forever only happens in this moment. My heart ached as I read your post. No, no, no, not now. Not yet. xxoo
Oh, lovely Crow. I think… this is, these are, change, not dress rehearsals… though incremental, in preparation for the big one. All while “forever” happens as you say, only now.
You have walked with me through the hardest — the hardest. I am forever thankful.
And I am thankful too that for me, now, with this man, it’s “not yet.”
Loving you…
Beautiful…and heartfelt.
Bless you, for sharing these truths about love.
Thank you, Bee. How else do we love but by making it up as we go along… whoops, learning?
So beautiful! Thank you for this lovely piece. My sweet husband passed into spirit 4 years ago and this just touched my heart! We learned through many lessons to live in the moment and to celebrate each one we had. I continue to practice that now, alone… loving the memories, but cherishing today because it too is precious even though it’s very different.
Oh, Nancy, widowhood is the fiercest part of the trail I’ve walked, bar none (was widowed just after my 48th birthday). You are wholly right: “to live in the moment and to celebrate each one we had. I continue to practice that now, alone… loving the memories, but cherishing today because it too is precious even though it’s very different.” Thank you.
Breathless. Wordless.
Thank you, Alice.
Yes, I don’t think I caught breath myself for several days, though I must’ve.
I don’t know that I drew a full breath for a couple of days myself, Alice.
Thank you.
Wow. You really have the gift and the best part is that you know how to share it so beautifully. Please give your significant other my warmest regards…..
Thanks, Harold… I gave him your regards; he’s looking forward to talking with you. xo
Oh my gosh, I had to sit down and read this and find out how it ended, was almost late for work! As a nurse, I just knew the bread would be white and the peanut butter would be hydrogenated…?
Thanks, Nina. It would have been terrible if a story about a health crisis made a nurse late for work!
I find it magical, the way you are able to pull us into a slice of your inner life. Glad all is well now, and no, my dad did not die from this :). Sunny well wishes from St Maarten.
Thank you, Ilja. We think often about our morning with you! I am so glad to know about your dad. We hope to return…
Your experience, your feelings, so beautifully expressed. Thank you.
Thank you, Shams.
If we had to go through it, or since we did, I am grateful to be able to write about it.
Beautiful, honest, and straight to my heart. Thank you!
I am so glad that this was the story I got to share… Grateful for the ending it had, and grateful it spoke to you, Laurel.
Crescent, many thanks for sharing your personal ordeals. I believe you give others strength and you grow stronger.
Thank you, Lynn. Tell you what, though — it’s like a card someone sent me during the period when my mother died and my house was flooded: woman at a typewriter working on a letter, which says, “Dear Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me, I’m strong enough now, thanks.” Sometimes I like to, you know, share recipes for cake! xo to you, Butch & Eureka…
Yet another life example that illustrates the sentiment of your musician friend (Bill?) who shared, “you haven’t had all of your surprises yet.” And how not all of the surprises will be good ones. I’m thrilled for both you and SALM that the outcome was good and looks good going into the future. I know how frightening these episodes can be; my ex had heart issues and I spent time in the hospital with him and caring for him afterwards, a decade later my husband had a virus attack his heart and mimic a heart attack. Not fun situations but both were given another chance to “re-write the script” of their lives and decide what to do with the wisdom gleaned from the experiences. (I had also fretted in both scenarios because of their coffee drinking habits – so it was very interesting for me to learn you had concerns about that, too!)
Thank you, Stephanie. Good LORD have we not had all our surprises yet (and it was Bill). I too am overjoyed at the outcome, yet still feel the hover of what could have been close to my own heart, as you well understand from your experiences, I’m sure.
I think the is-coffee-an-issue thing is part of wanting to find a why, an explanation, to make life seem less capricious and more logical. The sad and irritating and frightening fact is, of course, that positive, happy people who eat broccoli and quinoa and tofu and who exercise daily do sometimes get cancer or heart attacks… and I say that as one of those quinoa-eaters. (I’m big on the good habits, but quite clear that while they slant the odds in your favor, they are not insurance).
Again, I appreciate learning of your experience, and your taking the time to share it with me and other readers…
loved reading this. So vivid and artful and full of emotion, every word. So happy this is the treat I got to read this morning before tackling my to-do list!
I loved reading this. So vivid and artful and full of emotion, every word. So happy this is the treat I got to read this morning before tackling my to-do list!
Thank you thank you — and honored to be a pre to-do list treat, Joy!
I’m glad your ER visit ended well.
Me too, Brenda… It so could have been the other way. Got to confront my biggest fears (which are realistic in the sense that the way life is, is we will eventually lose or be lost to everyone we love, non-negotiably). Would prefered not to have had to… but, best possible outcome!
Thanks for sharing this journey. I honor you both. Two lives enriched by all the different layers of intimacy.
Keep living richly!
More power to you both beautiful souls. Thank you for sharing your journey, your humor and your wisdom. It is my honor to sit at your feet. Go algorithms. B, from way back maybe 2012 at Sue S in Westchester
I remember, Bobbie! That may have been the most unusual venue I’ve ever held a Fearless in, and that was a swell group. (You know, right, that Hawa, my mother’s caregiver who was helping me with the food, went on to become a well-known artist, having started with that little Zentangle at Sue’s dining room table? If you don’t google “Hawa Diallo Oprah Refugee Art” and see her amazing story, in which that Fearless is mentioned…)
These days I’m teaching either online or “hybrid” — meaning classes in real time, with some physically in the actual room with me and some there via Zoom. It is fun and has opened what I do to many who were unable to attend conventionally.
And …thank you for jiggling the algorithms.
xo
Always a joy to read your offerings; although the content may elicit uncomfortable feelings, always makes me FEEL. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Katie… xo
Oh Dragon… what a lovely, anxious piece. As soon as I read ‘A-Fib’ I recalled the times sitting with my kid (after he was more than 6 ft), head on his chest, thinking: this is too fast.
He also had it, and his drug use didn’t help. His doc (who was a youngster who thought using stimulants was a perfectly legit lifestyle choice) said: it’s all in normal range.
So Mark’s story hits hard (in the chest?) on this Valentine’s-month, FullMoon-in-Leo, feeling-my-kid day.
Happy to hear you are betrothed and joyously veering into the Brightdark. Go, Dragon.
Thank you, Mysti. I am so sorry you were able to identify with this, and as a mom — can’t imagine what this was like. And I am also sorry you had a stupid doc.
I appreciate your transparency in this comment so much. Brightdark indeed! xo
I re-read the end again. It sets the reader down so deftly, on the solid ground of affection and just enough philosophy.
Yesterday’s world was unusually androcentric ~ reading your story, feeling my Boyo peering through the Full Leo Moon, spending the evening with the Three Grown Godsons… so I had to pull my attention back a bit and return to your story. Delicious. Thank you.
Blowing kisses through the late winter air. D’you get ’em?
I love reading your writings. You and Mark are wonderful together; I’ve enjoyed the story of your journey so far and am looking forward to other chapters. xo
Thank you so much, Ellen. Ever surprising as it is, I’m looking forward to it too – despite the frightening times, as we have so often discussed on FB… xo
Though we don’t know one another, I always enjoy reading your posts and I have a window into what you speak of in this “late in life love“ thing. I was much younger when it started, falling head over heels with a man 22 years my senior. But when you are 27 and he is 49, all things are possible…and it seems like it will always be so. Now, 37 years later, much still is. But the changes are more challenging now, for both of us, reminding us daily of the urgency with which we must live and the intensity we must love one another. The problem is, you think you have time. Two major heart surgeries and many many wonderful days and nights later, we still hold the same feelings we had all those years ago. Just trying to live in the moment and realize how little time there is to waste. You know. ❤️
I do know. And I am sending love and respect and celebration and the wish for courage to you both.
Being able to know how the next 4 years evolved, the words take on a different view. One knows the journey you write about, just gets better and the bumps get sweeter.
Absolutely true, Cathy. I remembered this story as I was going through the shoulder recovery, with him looking after me, and so I looked it up for the first time in several years. Was filled with wonder at how our path had unfolded, unrolling slowly like a magic carpet, the pattern of which is revealed only as it gradually unrolls. It is as they say: hindsight (like this year) is 2020. But one always walks bravely into the future with vision almost entirely foggy.
Thanks for your words, deario!
So much true, here, resonates in my life. I married again at 40 to a lovely, devoted man 18 years senior. All these years later, he keeps saying, “I never thought it would turn out like this.” And I keep answering, “I knew what I was signing up for when I married you.” And I keep taking care of this lovely, devoted man and it’s just part of the deal. I don’t know what it takes to visualize a future in which our bodies grow old and fail us, but I know that it is much easier to do when you’re older and your body has had a few failures and you’ve watched the dying of some people you love.
Thank you, Emily. “I don’t know what it takes to visualize a future in which our bodies grow old and fail us, but I know that it is much easier to do when you’re older and your body has had a few failures and you’ve watched the dying of some people you love.” That is what it takes, I think. Experience. I don’t think we can imagine or visualize it anything close to fully until the factors you mentioned have put us through the lapidary machine.
I love that, in the midst of what you and he are doing, it is still the LOVE that animates it. Despite the inherent difficulties, not duty, LOVE.
More power to both of you, and endless love — at least, enough to take you home. xo
Nice that the mysterious “my guy” has a name, these days, and that he’s okay with you puttin’ it all out there. My own personal guy would put me in thumbscrews, and duct-tape my mouth if I shared such intimate details, but then, I would do the same to him. Oh, Ellen Z, I rather (well, more than rather) envy your openness and freedom as a writer, but I feel this will forever elude me. I have a fat manuscript of a dandy novel that, alas, I can never submit for publication until husband, daughter, mother, and a couple of friends are dead! I suppose I could, like you, select a *nom de plume* —but then I wouldn’t be able to do book signings and all that stuff. Oh, well. I did enjoy this piece of yours, especially the “empurpled breast” and the “watery blurp” of those manifold texts being sent by the awful-haired bimbo.
Assuming the manuscript actually exists — it’s not just potentially fat and dandy —- publish it anyway, or make the effort to do so.
Writers write. The vast majority of them use the material their life has given them. The vast majority of their friends and family forgive them (those who are left out are often the ones who complain, seriously!).
And there is the nom de plume route, as you mentioned. (As for booksignings and “that stuff” — overrated).
But if your story wants to be told, tell it, and damn the torpedoes. Perhaps someone out there needs to read the exact story about which you are hemming and hawing.
Other Bee — write!
BTW, CD is cannot really be considered a nom de plume. It’s my legal name, has been since 1972. On my passport and credit cards. I stand by it and it stands by me and we get into trouble together.
Glad you liked empurpled and blurp-woman.
Re: love in the time of cardio
What a gift to read first thing in the morning. I love how you invite the reader into your own anxiety, delight and awe.
It’s a reminder to me, in my own second chapter of love, to notice the tender connections in the midst of the daily. Thank you.
So happy to have conduited a little light your way, my dear Pan.
Oh Crescent! Absolutely Could Not Stop Reading this. It is beautifully written of course—compelling in words-man-ship but so heartfelt without being maudlin!
Thank you thank you, Beverly. Saccharine R Not Us! xxoo
Extraordinary. As is everything of yours that I have read. Also, the way you balance the depth, connectivity, and lust in your writing blows me away. And, of course, your amazing relationship almost makes me believe in the possibility of later life love, after being a single Antique Mama for so long. (Doesn’t Antique Mama sound so much better than Advanced Maternal Age?). Please note: this relationship engenders in me not one whit of envy; only happiness that you two have found each other.
Our journey took such a crooked path to get where it is… if it could happen, anything is possible. Truly, I often think about this.
I so relate to this! I had a knee replaced two months after Tim and I were married. We were both older adults. It was wonderful having him take of me.
This is a mostly invisible face of love. I am glad you and I (and our dear mates) get to see it! Thanks, Yvette.
Your words a perfect illustration~ the reader falls right into your scene!
Thank you for the intimacy and inspiration.
Thank you, Mishala.
Are you available as a private editor, for a fee? For, yes, my “assuming it actually exists” fat manuscript does, indeed, but is…too fat. I submitted it to a former editor at HarperCollins, now retired, who has sat on it for quite a while. He said it was two great books that “needed separating, like conjoined twins.” (I use his words, because I loathe the overuse of simile and metaphor in literature, but I gotta admit he is right. But. Separating the two storylines might mean killing one or the other, so…what’s a mother to do?)
And to anticipate your natural question: this retired editor is the (much older) husband of a college friend of mine, who is now is the early(?) stages of some sort of dementia, and pretty regularly crippled by GOUT (which I thought was a defunct disorder, but apparently not). So. I need a new reader. If you are too busy, can you recommend someone?
I’m ready to put it out there, and damn the torpedoes. You are right, writers write, and they/we are right to write.
Bee, my dear — yes, I do. I will send you an email about this rather than discuss it here. The edress is the one with the name of the Atlanta airport followed by four digits, yes? (How is that for being discreet, eh?)
Thanks,
CD
Wow, As one who carries several on – going heart issues and one who has been in love with the same guy for 49 years, This has touched me on so many levels. Thank you. ?
I came to this site by way of lentil soup and I’m leaving enriched by a woman with a fondness for slinging words. My teenaged daughters aspire to be writers and I will definitely be sharing this fantastic person I just met virtually with them. Thanks for what you do and also for the lentil soup recipe! 🙂
Wow, Ben, thank you for about half a dozen kinds of compliments here… you have made me feel very appreciated, which probably has extra meaning as we seem to be entering the era of “social distancing.” I am most glad to have virtually met you, too.
If you, or your daughters, are interested, I do teach a small group 10-week writing workshop called Tuesdays with Crescent, via Zoom. Next session will be in the fall, which gives you, and them, plenty of time to cogitate over whether leaping in might be a good move: https://dragonwagon.com/about-tuesdays-with-crescent/
Thank you again!
I absolutely love this piece. Interestingly, I recently wrote a chapter on this similar topic in a book I hope to one day complete – “You Only Die Once – You Better Get it Right”. I have always loved your writing, though we have never met and I have never told you so. I hope to correct both of those eternal voids one day soon. My grandparents were Eagle and Jack Thomas from Eureka Springs, Arkansas – and I have a fun reflection to share with you one day. My wife and I now own the last little house in Eureka and spend at least once a week in our soulful retreat. Wishing you well. Will Morris
Will, I loved Eagle and Jack! What a lovely connection. I am so glad you enjoy my work, and am glad you get to spend time in dear Eureka. I know the house, too. Stay safe, as we say these days. Warmly, CD
Crescent – once our social mobility is expanded, I would enjoy making an effort to get together. We can easily meet in Fayetteville as your prefer. You have my email address – you you mind sending me an email with yours in order to move our correspondence. Mahalo nui loa. Will