Hanging On a String

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed. ~ C. G. Jung

I'd like to thank those of you who have commented, gotten in touch and generally lent a shoulder to cry on, be it a real or digital one. I have appreciated it more than you could know.

The last two weeks have been some of the loneliest of my life and the experience of this grief has been very painful. It's one thing to commiserate about a death and get support from those that love you, but what has really hit me is the lack of people with whom to grieve the loss of the Maritimer as a person in his own right, not just who he was in the context of my life. I've had no one to have any "remember the time" or "I loved his smile" conversations with.

At any rate, it's been immensely healing to just cry, to just let pain out. Who is to say it is all related to the passing of the Maritimer? But I think a great deal of it is.

I have been trying to come to some conclusions., rolling this thing around in my head like a pinball. Yet, no sooner do I conclude something, but a new insight emerges and I am back to the beginning.

I think it's not knowing. Every other experience of the death of someone I've loved has been much tidier in the sense that there were no unknowns. I loved them and they knew it. They loved me and I knew that. The Maritimer and I never had a clean break. Our "break up", if you can call it that, seemed more borne of necessity. He was going back to Halifax. He didn't ask me to come with him and my feeling is that he didn't feel he could. My whole life was here. He'd realized his whole life, except me [I'm assuming], was out east. I don't know if he was just running away. I do know one thing absolutely: if there was a way to go back to Halifax and not hurt me, he would have found it.

Reliving these memories, has been the quintessential experience of "if I only knew then, what I know now." I've had sliding door moments, where I relive events between the Maritimer and I and make different decisions. I see our wedding, our house in Halifax, our dog, our son. I think this is the only way my brain can process his death right now, to fully remember and evaluate things, ask the "what if" questions in order to be finally reconciled to what did happen.

And what did happen? As I look back, I see two people desperately in love with each other trying their best to save their relationship, trying their best to communicate with each other and frankly just not being terribly good at either.

And yet, we never talked again about where things ended up and that was what prompted me yet again to go looking for him. I needed to know he was ok. I needed to let him know I was ok, that we survived losing each other. I take comfort in the fact that unsurprisingly, I've since found out he was well thought of, well loved and surrounded by many friends in his life. He was ok.

He left me 11 years ago...and yesterday. That's the crux of it. Love doesn't have an expiration date. My life has been what it has been. The last decade has been extremely challenging in many respects. I did the best I could and it's netted out where I am now.

The lesson this has all brought home to me is that it's important to go through life with settled accounts. Say what you need to say. Try what you want to try. Dont' hurt or betray your own feelings because you don't want to hurt someone else's. Be reconciled to any outcome by being able to look back knowing you saw it through to the end either way, that you were fully present. It's not about everything being sunshine and lollipops and tied up in neat little packages. It's about living as honestly as you can.

So here's some honesty.

I regret not keeping in touch with the Maritimer even though I had my reasons. I'm sad he didn't keep in touch with me and I'll never know his.

I regret not being honest about my feelings and not having a real conversation with him about the whole damn thing.

I'm fairly certain I can speak for him on this last point. I think we both thought of each other briefly every Halloween [the day we met] and occasionally on our respective birthdays. Through the years, we encountered funny stories, pieces of music or news items and thought for a moment about how each other would react. I think we ultimately always thought of each other fondly, and wanted the other be whole and happy.

I also think the frequency of our thoughts of each other lessened as the years went by. I think our lives went on and the passing of time buried our disappointment with the past and unearthed an ability to more fully appreciate the present.

Selfishly, I have to reckon with the fact that despite our experience together and the love we shared, I may have ultimately ended up as just one woman with whom he had a relationship and that he meant more to me than I did to him. Perhaps his communication didn't stop out of some romantic notion of its being unbearable or his own demons preventing him from fighting for me. It's quite conceivable he just didn't give a shit. I did, after all, find out about his dying by accident. It's not as if anybody knew to tell me. The thought of this hurts me greatly, yet in recognizing it, I don't mean to disparage the Maritimer at all. It's just life and fair enough.

Time may tell the full story on that. It may never do so. In the meantime, I wait to hear more from folks out east. I plan to share my memories with them and hear theirs so that I can move on.

When all is said and done, I have only memories and the certainty of now. As most of the mental and emotional dust settles, I find that the memories I have are pretty damn good. What I have now is damn good too and deserves my full attention and commitment. In the end, after all the bullshit, hurt feelings, miscommunication and lost opportunities, all that's left, is love. And that, I'll never move on from.