A friend wrote recently about preparing to plunge into a
rooftop pool with a spectacular view of the south Asian capital she was
visiting. She’s a recent widow, her
husband having died about a year ago. A
lovely guy, he was relatively young, not yet eligible for Medicare. Before my friend dove into the pool, she saw
a young pair of honeymooners gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes. Suddenly she was overwhelmed by grief. “Life’s a bitch,” she wanted to tell
them. “Loss is the price of love.”
That’s true, but the honeymooners would have been unlikely
to absorb her message. If they are like
my wife and me at their age, their own death is not yet real to them. It takes a long time for that to happen, but
for me, at least, it happened twenty years ago, when I experienced my first
bout with cancer. It was at about that
time that I began to file material that would be useful to my wife if I
preceded her. It included data on our
bank accounts, various clerical procedures, people and institutions that should
be notified about my death, and so on.
I’m five and a half years older than my wife, and since men
don’t live as long as women in any event, the probability of my predeceasing
her is high. Now that I’m eighty, with
an arm’s length of medical problems, the probability is even higher. I wonder how she will manage without me, but
that’s giving her too little credit and me too much. She’ll manage perfectly well, although I’m
sure it will be hard for her at first.
How do I know it will be hard? Because I put myself in her place and imagine
how I would feel if she checked out before me.
Still, I’d say that the profound pain of loss is a price worth paying
for the great happiness that our marriage has brought me.
2010-2012 Anchises-An
Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved
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