Obit

Sadly, I have to report that the man I referenced here has now died.

I have so many mixed feelings.

Why him and not me?  How did he live such that his life had so many blessings?  Talent well used, an ability to form healthy relationships, home-making skills.

I have none of those things and I am still here.  I didn't know whether to beam, cry, or rage with envy when I read his wife's FB tribute. I don't want to recap it all here, as it went into a great deal of detail and also I want to respect their privacy.  But this struck a note.

We encouraged each other and complimented each other. We had very different brains, talents and character defects, but we genuinely loved and respected each other.

A lot of this is relevant because I am shepherding someone through the end of life.  Of course much is different.  He was a man in his 50s who was dying of a terminal illness and was in hospice.  My partner is going to be 83 next month and is bedridden but not "ill".  Whatever else I complain about, I feel blessed to have this time with her.

Did we encourage each other?  Probably no.  We clung to each other and she, particularly, felt   threatened by any venturing forth on the part of the other.  I had to fight, literally, like a tiger, for any scrap of independence I had.  Now it's easier because she's too out of it to make demands.  She can't tell me "you can't go to the Met unless you go with me" because she doesn't go anywhere.  So yes, I will go out with friends.  She has accepted that I must sing, not just in church.

And yet we have always loved each other, passionately and desperately.  My greatest joy in life is to lie curled up by her side watching tv, or to hold her little hand.

I suppose the man who died, and his wife, were just enough younger than me (and the fact that this was his third marriage, and they both came to it as people, not children says something) that he was able to have a relationship with less teenage (or less 1950s/1960s) baggage. You know - stand by your man (or your butch beau) and the worse he treats you the more brownie points you get, because of course, life is supposed to be like a rock song - or an opera.  I partnered when I was an age that is now not even considered adult (25) during a decade when the most important thing for a woman was to "please" a partner, not to be a person. Now people develop selves first, partner later.

And of course I always envied how proud he was of his daughter, as I wrote several years ago. Another example of a healthy relationship. My mother was never proud of me that way: she alternated between mercilessly criticizing me and taking any of my accomplishments (certainly if they involved writing) to be her own.

I have spent the past, God knows, 8 years (since I left the full-time work force) trying to make a rich, vibrant, fulfilling life for myself and not much has come of it.  Something has come of it, yes.  I keep singing better and better.  I realize I will never do anything I even like for a living, but that I can do many things that I like. I can write. I have discovered that I enjoy helping children with language skills. I can live on very little money.  I don't have to travel.  I don't have the money or the energy to turn this overstuffed British spinster style studio apartment into a "middle class home" (read shovel everything out, even temporarily, and have the floors sanded and waxed and the walls painted, not to mention keeping the dining table looking like a dining table instead of a place to keep my electronic keyboard) but I try to say that this does not mean that I have "failed" at being an adult.

Love is love whether you share erudite conversation at a dinner table with a tablecloth or hunker down in front of the tv with sandwiches on paper plates.  I don't believe this man's widow loved him any more than I love my partner because they lived in nice surroundings and spoke to each other like adult friends instead of  like squabbling teenagers madly in love who don't get along.

Most precious of all was the fact that his last words to her were "I love you".  If I can have that too, that is really all I have a right to ask for.