I was sitting there reading the NY Times while visiting Michele as she was stretched out on the couch with her right leg propped up on a pillow with an ice pack on her knee. We had been sitting quietly, me reading - she thinking, for upwards of an hour without saying a word to each other.
She was staring out the window and looking up at the night sky, when she noticed me staring and turned to look at me for a moment: “What have you been thinking about all this time?” I finally asked her as I glanced at the newspaper.
“Nothing really” she replied and turned to look back out the window. After a long pause, in which I read an entire article, she asked, “Have you ever read Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein?”
“No, but I have heard of them.” I stared at her thoughtfully for awhile. “I was just wondering… is this what married life is like.” She looked at me intently for a moment, almost as if to read me.
“Well, that depends on what you’re feeling at this moment?”
After considering a bit, I shared: “comfortable, serene, relaxed.”
After a deep reflective sigh, and with a tone of real honesty, almost wistfully, she said “Imagine those feelings, along with contentedness and an abiding love and you have the feelings of someone who is happily married.” After making sure I understood, she settled back into a quiet reverie of years gone past and didn’t speak again until I left.
Though she is still mourning, she is now in a place of acceptance and simply learning to live with the loss. Sometimes I am blown away by her resilience, conviction and strength. It almost makes me feel self-conscious and somewhat ashamed that I tried to play her once.
Last month, during lunch she said to me that I needed to learn more about women in order to respect them as people so that I could eventually have a successful relationship with one. As I check in on her I can’t help but think how right she was and how this is all part of learning that life lesson.
Thery often hard loss make us to think about the main point of our life.
Posted by: Eva at January 26, 2007 05:37 AM