Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I was introduced to Tommy’s music by my own guitar guru soon after we met, and discovered her when she opened for him when E and I first saw Tommy perform up in Cave Creek. I didn’t realize they were a couple until he kissed her as he stepped onstage. They travel the world together, and while I don’t know if she still opens for him, she always joins him to sing a few songs. She’s good; this is no charity case. Tommy is fifty-something, and his bride is obviously not, although I don’t know her age. As you might imagine, I thought there were a lot of parallels between their situation and ours. A and I joked about hanging out on my tour bus when I was famous rock star, or perhaps my tour VW van if I was not so famous. When you see them together, either offstage or on, they are obviously in love. And she has the best damn guitar teacher on the planet to herself 24 hours a day. You can’t help but be happy for them.

A day or two after A passed away, the brand new Tommy DVD arrived in my mailbox, pre-ordered a month or two ago. And while I love Tommy and his virtuosity on the guitar, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to watch it anytime soon. A and I talked about Tommy all the time, waxing rhapsodic about feats of guitar skill we couldn’t even hope to approach. I always gave A crap that Tommy loved California more than Arizona because he was always there, doing a half-dozen shows in a row. In fact, A was scheduled to see Tommy twice the week after he passed away, but he didn’t make it, obviously. There are 4 other shows he had a ticket to with his best friend, too. I never got to see a Tommy show with A myself because his best friend was his steady date to those shows; also in the way was my status as a secret, of course. I’m only beginning to see how much was lost, for all of us, because of this secret. I can only sigh; it is what it is, and there’s nothing to be done for it now.

In any case, a few days had passed, and I knew I could use some distraction, and maybe I could handle watching Tommy. E is a Tommy fan, too, so we snuggled into bed with the dogs and popped the DVD in. And it was okay, or rather, I was okay, and the video was excellent. I was a little wistful watching it, but so amazing is the man’s playing that you are transported, and that’s what I really wanted, to be taken away for a little while.

And then Lizzie came onstage to sing with him, and the whole time I watched them together, all I could think was “Damn…that poor girl. Some day she’s going to be hurting like me, and sooner than she was prepared to.” My broken heart was broken further, and in advance, for her.

Now, of course, a million things could happen before then. They could break up. She could go first. But a significant age difference in a couple cannot help but bring up some harsh truths one would rather not think about. I can only speak for myself, but when I became friends with, then fell in love with, a man 20 years my senior, it was always in the back of my mind that “forever” wasn’t going to be as long as it would’ve been if that age difference didn’t exist. At least if you assume the norm, which I did. Of course, tomorrow never knows, and I was not unaware that many things could transpire to change our relationship over time, but I truly believed our love would stay strong and no matter what happened, we would always be friends. I also believed that he had at least 20 more years on this planet during which we’d enjoy that friendship. We joked about me being an old lady—his age—and him being a very old man, and I would push him around in his wheelchair. Perhaps we’d take a spin down Lombard Street. The further joke of it was that I am far more decrepit than he was, and that more than likely, he’d be pushing ME in the wheelchair. Always a gentleman, he promised he’d keep me in new tennis balls for my walker.

It’s not really funny anymore.

I knew that some day I’d be here. I knew that some day I’d be looking at a long stretch of years without him. But I thought in terms of being without him at the end of my life, not the bulk of it. I never for second thought it would be now.

Many people are against May-December romances, particularly when she is May. Usually the man is perceived as some kind of borderline pedophile in the middle of a mid-life crisis, and the woman is denigrated by women his age for poaching from their limited reserve of decent, datable men. (Which is ridiculous, because no matter your age, the pool of decent, datable men is too small. Just ask single straight women and gay men.) When I talked to his friend on the phone, and my age came up, they said “A had a babe!” They were happy for him, and being funny, but it was still a mild shock, as I knew it would be. I’m hardly a child, but there you go. Expectations are scattered like Claymores all over this for me, just waiting for me to stumble into them.

Of course, no one can know how little age really matters when you find a kindred spirit unless they’ve been there. I made cracks about Calista and Harrison myself; I haven’t in over 2 years, though. I get it. The heart wants what the heart wants, and numbers and distance and inconvenient circumstances are no match for love. But no one ever talks about this lonely and inevitable reality, probably because it was too sad a prospect to think about. So you try not to. Honestly, it brought tears to my eyes every time the thought flitted through my head, long before I even had an inkling how much and how hard a person could cry, day after day.

One could reasonably argue that there are no guarantees in life, and while they’re right, you have to be able to count on things not radically changing from day to day, or there’d be no living. You couldn’t live if you had to figure out a different kind of gravity every day, or if you had to remember to breathe, or if you woke up each day to find that everything you did yesterday doesn’t work anymore, and couldn’t even tie your shoes or get the car out of the garage, even though you were certain you knew how before. If you couldn’t count on things staying reasonably stable, learning would be pointless, because every situation would be new.

It’s fine to be all Zen, the-cup-is-already-broken, live-in-the-moment, but human beings and most other critters are creatures of habit. It is when things don’t go according to the routine that we start to worry, and we’re usually right to. And when something like this hits you, you have to figure out a different gravity as you suddenly become heavier and don’t want to move, and you have to remember to breathe, and nothing today works like it did yesterday. Or rather, everything works like it did yesterday; everything except you. You feel like a foreigner in your own land, in your own house, in your own skin.

I made it through the video…almost. I was expecting Tommy to end with “Initiation,” as he often does, a grand finale you have to see and hear to believe. But he went another way, and sang “Still Can’t Say Goodbye.” That song has always made me cry, even on the best of days. It wrecked me this time around. I can’t say goodbye; I don’t want to. Never wanted to. But it seems the choice is not mine.

I knew I’d get shorted, but never imagined I’d be robbed and beaten like this. Everyone says “Be grateful for the time you had together,” as if I wasn’t all along, and am not now. It’s easy to say. But take a long, hard look at those you love most in life, and then tell me precisely how much time with them is “enough”; how many years with them will satisfy you, and make you feel like anything on top of that is just bonus you can take or leave?

Yeah. That’s what I thought.