Fighting winter storms of love

The snow wiped out my monthly extra visit to Jane’s grave on the tenth of the month. It tried to do the same to my plans to spend part of Valentine’s Day in the cemetery with her. Twenty-six months and four days after her death from NET cancer and I am still nowhere close to being where we both expected I would be by now emotionally.

Friendships I can have, but romantic and physical relationships remain beyond me…

Last night I got notes from two students who were both, I think, stunned that I had not moved further down the trail of dealing with my grief. One even suggested I should be thinking about getting into a relationship at this point–that Jane would want me to be happy.

The sources of happiness

But happiness is not determined by whether I am single or not. Neither Jane nor I believed being a couple was the key to happiness. Rather, we saw doing meaningful work as the single most important thing where that was concerned. Not that our relationship did  not bring us vast reservoirs of joy–it did. But we had both been single a long time before we met and had clear expectations we were likely to remain that way all our lives. We knew happiness was not exclusively the possession of those who wore rings on their fingers.

But the lack of social spontaneity is equally untenable.

In fact, much of what we saw around us argued the contrary. We had both seen marriages that floundered from one unhappy event to the next before dissolving into pure despair and divorce. Marriage was a daring act for anyone. And for us, coming so late to the party, it was even more difficult. For those in their mid-to-late-30s with fully formed personalities and habits, marriage means an intense period of adjustment fraught with all kinds of peril.

Logical love

Jane and I knew the risks of trying to combine our lives but made a conscious decision to make the level of commitment marriage requires. And we worked very hard to evolve what we had beyond where it began. Every day was an act of conscious love, both for each other and for the world we lived in. We had access to each others souls that I cannot explain because I do not fully understand it myself.

Every day was an act of conscious love…

How we could have so badly miss-read what all of that would mean for the other if one of us died is a thing even now I have difficulty comprehending. Part of it had to do with a deeply shared belief in the gradual perfection of the human soul over multiple lifetimes–that we had shared lives in the past and would do so again in the future–but it does not fully explain that miss-reading of how I would react to her death. Plato described true friendship as one soul in two bodies but I have yet to find an analogy that works for true lovers.

The hunger for physical and spiritual love

The hunger for a renewal of that kind of relationship is sometimes unbearable. I am starved not only for the sensation of physical touching but for the touch of that other soul as well. I crave both in the same way a junkie craves heroin or cocaine–and a part of me would settle for a steady supply of even the most watered down version of either one. I am consciously terrified of an unregulated or unexpected hug because of its seductive power. Even someone taking my hand at an unguarded moment  has enormous destructive potential.

…happiness is not determined by whether I am single or not.

So every social interaction is carefully considered–almost choreographed in my mind before it happens. But the lack of social spontaneity is equally untenable. I am afraid that I too often come across as either overly cold or severely psychologically wounded–and both those things, in themselves, can send the very mixed signals I am desperate to avoid.

The shadow of love

But until–and unless–I can emerge from the shadow cast by the love we shared with each other I have to be very careful how I interact with others. Friendships I can have, but romantic and physical relationships remain beyond me, however much a part of me desires it were otherwise. I have to continue to deal with those feelings and desires the same way I dealt with my earlier craving for alcohol in the days just after Jane’s death. I consciously avoided even a glass of wine until I reached a point the glass of wine was no longer a craving but a thing over which I could exert full conscious control.

Twenty-six months and four days after her death…

Relationships that extend beyond friendship may someday be possible for me again. I think Jane would like that–at least she said so before she went into the hospital. But I will not ask anyone to live in the shadow of what we had–including myself. That would be a profanation of who we were and who I am and what I believe.