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Crescent Dragonwagon

Love is not comparative, except when it is

By Crescent Dragonwagon

He would have been 60 yesterday, my late husband.

But he didn’t even live to 50.

In 2000, he went on his usual 3 times a week bicycle ride out towards Beaver Lake, turned at the Conoco station (which, because they used to rent canoes out there, he always referred to as the “Canoe-Co”) and headed home.

Instead, he bicycled into eternity, as I have written before.

CD Ned b_w

The unreality of driving over to Fayetteville, Arkansas, once a week, working with the gifted, compassionate, funny psychotherapist William F. Symes, never failed to strike me, sometimes with as much emotional force as that small Chevvy pick-up had physically struck Ned. How was it possible? How had this become my life? How could it be that Ned was no more, would never return, and the assumed future we had shared was equally vanished, and now I was left to come to a therapist’s office to discuss this impossibility as if it were real when it could not possibly be?

Nevertheless I went.

One day after we had worked  together for some time Bill Symes said, “You keep saying, ‘I’m never going to be with anyone again,’ Crescent. ” In a tone of some incredulity, he continued, ” So, is this something we actually have to spend time discussing? Something you actually believe?”

I thought about this. “Yes, I believe it, ” I said.

“Oh-kay,” said Bill, with an exaggerated, eye-rolling sigh. “So, why do you believe this?”

I shot back, “Because Ned and I had, for the better part of 23 years, something most people don’t get for 15 minutes! Who am I to expect to get that twice?”

Symes shot back, “You co-created it for 23 years, who better?”

I took that in.

I began to experiment. Instead of saying, “Ned was the love of my life,” I started saying, “Ned was the love of the first part of my life.”

And eventually, a few years later,  I met, grew to love, and lived with but did not marry, David Koff.

crop, larger

By his own disclosure from the first, David, an activist and documentary filmmaker, had once suffered, but was now “in recovery” from, depression.  Still, filled with vitality, a devoted gym-goer with (at 62) a body a 25 year-old would envy, a warrior against injustice, it was hard to believe. David was kind, smart, funny. We were easily compatible, enjoyed and respected each other, were companionably loving. Did I miss the near-constant overt expressions of affection, the vibrant sexuality and flirtation, the shared spirituality and full emotional in-tune-ness Ned and I had had, that David and I did not? Yes, of course. But I came to feel, well, this is what loving someone as an adult is like.   I told myself, “This is a different course in Relationship School, CD. You have a different kind of learning and growing to do with David.” And to some extent this was true.

But then the depression David had alluded to when we first met came roaring back. It grow to an out-of-control wild-fire. There were therapists. New medications were tried. Hospitalization discussed. I could still remember the 3 hours he used to spend daily at the gym, five days a week, eagerly; yet now to get him to walk to the end of the block became a struggle, requiring much persuasion on my part. There were days when he was silent. I was exhausted, perplexed, angry, at wit’s end, lonely.

“I miss you!” I said to him once, early in this period. “I miss me too,” he said, sadly.

I told myself something that had been true for me. “The harder it is to go through, the better it is on the other side. He will get through this. There will be golden days for him on the other side of this. For him; for me.”

But it turned out that this was true for me, not him.

Three years after the depression returned,  David took his life.

Somewhere in there, I noticed I had gone back to saying, at least to myself, “Ned was the love of my life.”

*

When I began, yet again, to date, after I lost David, I  started making a disclosure of my own, if it ever looked like it might become sexual (which for me always meant there was a larger compatibility).

“Look, there’s chemistry between us, ” I’d say to the possible gentleman-in-question. “But if we follow it, please know that while I’m very loving and affectionate, if you’re looking for a grand all-consuming kind of passion, I’m not it. The capacity to be ‘in love’ ended for me with the death of my husband.”

I believed this. And, had a couple of pleasant-enough flings on this basis.

Then I met the man I sometimes refer to affectionately as my Alpha Dude (he does not want his name mentioned, nor his picture shown, in social media). Somewhere during our first lunch, I realized that he had an incredible mind: agile, curious, original, interesting and I thought, “Whoa! This is a very special guy. I do not want to let him get away without knowing him a whole lot better. ”

When he got up to use the bathroom, I texted my best friend: “On a date. I think this may be the one.”

One day, maybe our second or third time together in bed, I realized things had progressed without my giving my disclosure. I propped myself up on one elbow.

“Did I give you the rap?” I asked.

“I don’t know, what’s the rap?” he asked.

I gave him the rap.

He eyed me wryly. “Rethinking this, are we?” he said.

In two days, Alpha Dude and I will celebrate our second anniversary, albeit apart from each other (he’ll be working in LA, I in Arkansas; he lives in New York, and I in Vermont, though I spend winters elsewhere. “It’s complicated,” as they say on Facebook. Still, there has never been a period longer than two weeks since we met when we do not manage to have at least a few days together).

He just came and went for the sixth time to Arkansas,  to the small town in which I lived with Ned for so long, where, since David died, I have been spending part of each winter. This time he was here for three days around Valentine’s Day. One night we went out for dinner at the local Thai restaurant. As we left, we were hailed by two friendly acquaintances of mine, Johnice and Debbie. Debbie asked where he was from. He told her New York.  I said that he was a California native, and, knowing how people down here tend to feel about Californians, added, teasingly, “We try to forgive him for that.”

He piped up with his Southern bona fides. “Well, I lived for ten years in Mississippi.” And then, truthfully, with pitch-perfect Mississippi inflection added, “My mother always said she was born in Biloxi, but raised in Mobile.”  From there it somehow devolved to him jivily explaining how he had wanted to buy a pig but a man tried to sell him a hawg, and he tried to take it back, but it was his fault because he never should’ve bought it because it was in a poke… and what were going to do about these Chinese stealin’ our data, and lawd, they was a passel of ’em.

By this time my acquaintances and I were bent double laughing. He excused himself to go to the bathroom and indicated, with a head-gesture to me (out of their sight-line) that he would be ready to go when he returned.

Johnice said, “It sure is good to see you laughing again, Crescent.”

I heard myself say, “Well, I never thought I would ever love someone in as many ways as I loved Ned, and now I do.”

He emerged from the bathroom, and we left.

But, as happens when you accidentally speak aloud a truth you had not previously recognized, the words continued to reverberate.

I had not said, “As much as I loved Ned.” For if there is a measurement that is accurate in these realms, I do not know it. And does one not one’s capacity to love change over time and with experience?

And I had not mentioned David.  I do not know how, at least not yet, to put him into the equation. Which David? The David I knew and loved well, if not passionately, for five years? The tortured David increasingly eaten by a disease that is, I believe, physiological in nature but symptomatic of violently disordered thoughts? I lived with that David for another 3-plus  years, and it was very hard. Then,  when David chose to exit life,  it was an act so violent it mostly overshadowed that earlier lovable David. And that is its own pity. (Indeed, my truest moments of grief in this instance come when I recall the happy David, who had left me, and himself, long before he ended his actual life, so intolerably painful).

And yet, I live uneasily with this: though I truly loved David, even at his best I did not do so in as many ways, in as many areas, as I did Ned, with whom I shared every color of the spectrum I had, or then had.

As I do, to my amazement, with my Alpha Dude. I haven’t had all my surprises yet.

And perhaps the spectrum, now, is even wider than it was with Ned, when I was young. Then, mortality had not tried me the way fat, cooked in a hot skillet, is “tried” from bacon. I suspect I am more capable of love and loving now in part because of loss and grief.  Because of having been loved by and loving these two very different men, one torn from life at the height of his joyful powers, the second of whom chose death. Because of them,  I am better at loving, and I understand the terms: nothing is for keeps. I am probably more humble, and less controlling, because I know how little can be controlled. Which is humbling.

Thus age and experience give one more colors. This is also true for my Alpha Dude, who is my present (and I hope for the duration) partner, who also been tried by grief and loss.

Yet I can’t chalk this up just to the passage of time: more colors are not inherent in aging. In fact I had watched David’s colors fade and diminish over time till there were only a few shades of inky gray. One of the great unanswerables: why are some saved and some lost? Why does what sinks one person compel another to rise?

dine painterly heart
Resilience. Love,  the capacity and desire for it, the willingness to want it even when you know it ends with loss: all mysterious.

Spiritual love is not mysterious in this way, though it is also not understandable by the mind. Objectless, loving because it is love itself, and thus it is its nature to love: it is “the peace that surpasseth understanding,” so why try? When we are in it, there is no “we”, only it. And later, when we return from that state, we recall it as sublime, but cannot re-experience it at will: for when it comes again (and it does, but only by what’s often called grace) again there is no we, no I. Just it. Or It.

But interpersonal human love… that is a mystery. It is also the petri dish for personal, psychological, and emotional development. For acceptance. For release. It asks, and gives, so much. It is neither safe nor simple. I learned these things with Ned, and in a wholly different way, with David. And I am learning them anew.

And I know, now, that love can be real even if its palette is limited with certain people, for I did love David, despite there being fewer shades.

But oh how overwhelmingly glad I am again to find unlimited colors as my dear Alpha Dude and I collaborate, creating the mutually made picture that is our eccentric, funny, hot, interesting, engaging late-life passion. I love him not as I did Ned – of course not –  but in loving him, I do so in just as many ways.

This fills me with wonder.

For finally, what is any of this life for except but to keep learning and learning how to give and receive love? Time takes a life, takes all lives, takes those we love… but it does not and cannot take life, or love, itself.

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Filed Under: Nothing Is Wasted on the Writer

Comments

  1. alice says

    February 21, 2016 at 5:30 pm

    Who better?

    • Crescent Dragonwagon says

      February 21, 2016 at 8:42 pm

      Thank you, Alice. xxxooo

  2. Joanie says

    February 21, 2016 at 9:02 pm

    So very glad that heartfelt love is a part of who you are! May rainbows follow you all of your days!

    • Crescent Dragonwagon says

      February 27, 2016 at 11:52 pm

      Thank you, Joanie… I don’t think anyone gets rainbows ALL days, though maybe eventually there’s some kind of inner color present no matter what the exterior weather… But that we don’t only makes the moments when we do spectacular, I think.

  3. Pan says

    February 22, 2016 at 7:52 am

    Amen.

    • Crescent Dragonwagon says

      February 27, 2016 at 11:39 pm

      Amen and awomen, Pan! xo

  4. Aurora Huston says

    February 22, 2016 at 1:16 pm

    I started a memoir while in the womb of The Writer’s Colony in Eureka Springs. Sadly when I left this sanctuary my writing stopped. Not all at once but in only a trickling of words and emotions that left me empty. My rational mind tells me that Eureka or the quietness of the Hollow that made my words flow but the feeling of the sincere abandon of letting words leak the truth of my heart and soul as your writings have for you. I admire and lust for your passion in life and love. How do you drain the festering of pain?

    • Crescent Dragonwagon says

      February 27, 2016 at 11:38 pm

      Aurora. I think you USE it. As material in writing, and for self-understanding.

      We all get pain in this life. If we make use of it, at least it has meaning, and this sometimes transmutes it. Certainly it prevents festering, for it is open to the air.

      Write every day, no matter where you are, BTW. That’s a core practice for me, and steadfast. A still place in this middle of this always whirling, often difficult world. Practice as opposed to “real writing”, that is , writing with an intended outcome.

      There you go, babe! Bon chance…

  5. Keith Brenton says

    February 23, 2016 at 3:07 pm

    You give me hope. Thank you.

    • Crescent Dragonwagon says

      February 27, 2016 at 11:33 pm

      Thank you, Keith. It was given back to me, as you know, wholly unexpectedly. I am honored to pass it along to you.

  6. EJ says

    March 25, 2016 at 11:28 am

    Oh my lord, CD, this is lovely. Makes me just sit and think.

  7. Lee Ann Dodson says

    April 13, 2016 at 3:52 pm

    I had not discovered your blog until today. In some inexplicable way I needed your stories today. Right now. Every life shares common threads..a handful more than others. It is a dear gift you choose to share your life and words with others.

    The phrase “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” comes to mind often. I have been wondering what it is I so dislike in those words. Maybe it is a reflection of what situations prompt people to voice this too often uttered thought. Is it a truth? Maybe. Maybe not. No one wishes to become stronger via tragedy and strife. And what good is strength if in gaining all this muscle you have to lose so much. I don’t know.

    To the question, “How do you drain this festering of pain?” You answered, ” I think you USE it.” Bells rang. This is true. One takes the unbearable angst and hurt and blinding gray out and does something, anything, to channel through. And then you get up and barrel through it again and again until there comes a day light shows here and there. Flecks of color appear. The pain is your fuel and you burn through it until Incombustible Light replaces that dirty, dark, toxic crap.

    It is great if creative endeavors are the means to use that pain but I have also found that hard, grueling labor, like digging ditches and hacking bamboo is can push you further faster. That is what I have done on days I cannot pick up a paintbrush or wash one single dirty dish or put pen to paper for more than three words.

    Those of who aren’t killed by the pain all carry a bucket of tricks to get through from one day to the next. Some tricks are kept in reserve for those moments nothing else seems to work. Each person’s bucket varies. Mine is unabashedly chaotic and unorganized but so far, it has proved its worth…..it’s weight in ‘gold’.

    Thank you Crescent for being the jewel in this day.

    • Crescent Dragonwagon says

      April 13, 2016 at 4:43 pm

      Lee Ann, I am touched and humbled that I inadvertently was able to add light to your day… And glad, glad, glad. Life just asks so much of us. Helping oithers, even if accidentally, is one way I think we use the hardships, instead of be victimized by them.

      During the three month period when I narrowly avoided a lawsuit with my brother, my mother died, my house was flooded (I lost a third of it) and my partner took his own life, a friend sent me a card with a woman composing a letter at a typewriter. “Dear Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me,” she was writing. “I’m strong enough now, thanks.” Yep! (THAT was a good friend).

      My visit with Hattie Mae turned out to be happy, too!

      xxoo

      • Lee Ann Dodson says

        April 15, 2016 at 1:31 am

        How kind of you! So now you have given me a smile on another day. Hearing another and letting them know you have listened is such an important act of compassion. To look into the eyes of the clerk ringing up your groceries and holding their gaze long enough for them to see that you do see them and then just saying something kind, well, you haven’t saved a life or done anything heroic, but that tiny moment of connection and recognition is something indeed.

        A few years ago I remember reading something to the effect of ” sometimes the most courageous act of bravery is getting up to face another day’…. I know you have done this. Your friend who sent you that perfect card also knew. And Hattie Mae surely knows the significance of the Love you share and the mountains and valleys you have crossed to see her again.

        When I can remember that if all else fails, the importance of just showing up, or pausing to listen, or ‘being there’ is a golden act then the haunting thoughts of ‘never good enough’ melt away.

        You share your life, expose your soul, risk all sorts of things to reach and connect with others. And I say, “Here, here! Crescent Dragonwagon!” For you have already done good and the rest is all icing on the cake.

        xxoo back at ya!

  8. KC says

    April 30, 2016 at 8:07 am

    How timely for me to read this right now. While I work with teen parents and fragile families, and spend much of my time exploring the concept of resilience and how to supports its presence in young lives, I don’t pay enough attention to it – nor apply what i know about it – during a very emotionally unstable, chaotic, “fragile” time in my own life. This resonated for me and pushed me to allow resilience to emerge for myself as well, instead of staying stuck. Thank you for this.

    • Crescent Dragonwagon says

      April 30, 2016 at 9:55 pm

      Thank you, KC. I am so glad this spoke to you. Yes yes yes… especially for those of us who care for others — we can’t give away what we ourselves do not possess. Cultivating self-care — and reminding oneself of what one already knows — it’s just a forever thing. Good luck and courage, dear Katie…

  9. David says

    August 29, 2017 at 1:37 pm

    I think this is the most beautiful read I’ve experienced in a very long time. Maybe, ever. I am moved and inspired. Thanks for sharing.

    • Crescent Dragonwagon says

      September 1, 2017 at 2:02 pm

      Thank you so very much, David.

Read Aloud with Crescent and Mark

NOT A LITTLE MONKEY, by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrted by Michelle Chessaree

"So, the little girl climbed into the big waste-basket and waited." ' Oh no,' said her mother, ' we don't want to throw you away.'"There are many ways to express love and the need for attention. Here, a busy mother and her just-a-bit naughty little girl tease each other affectionately — the little girl making her point without even uttering a word.That's today's story time — read aloud by the author's daughter at Crescent Dragonwagon's Writing, Cooking, & Workshops, with Mark Graff's "text support" and discussion."Just right for two-to-fours, the humor of this true-to-life story of a mischievous little girl who blocks her mother's attempts to clean house will elicit giggles from the lollipop set." Kirkus Reviews

Posted by Crescent Dragonwagon's Writing, Cooking, & Workshops on Thursday, June 4, 2020

Read Aloud with Crescent

Read Aloud with Crescent

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The Washington Post on Crescent’s Lentil Soup Recipe

Greek Lentil Soup with Spinach and Lemon, photograph by Tom McCorkle, Washington Post

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