Recovering junkie
I possess a treasure trove of chat archives and e-mails from A because of our loving long-distance. We e-mailed intermittently all day long, chatted before lunch and before we left for the day, and then for a few hours most every night until bedtime unless one of us wasn’t home. Were I to attempt to print out all these words, it would run to thousands and thousands of pages, which is why I don’t. I have redundant back-ups of the electronic files so I don’t lose them, because if I did, I’d be inconsolable.
In the first couple of weeks after he died, I read and reread e-mails almost compulsively, bawling my eyes out as I did, desperately grasping for something of him to hold on to. I imagined that I would be doing similarly as time wore on, and that it would be a comfort to me.
With those e-mails and chats, I can revisit him as he really was, instead of the image my still-grieving and ever-smitten mind creates of him. And, in fact, the reality is even better than the memory. In his own words, I see again that he was sweeter, funnier, more profane, more sarcastic, more thoughtful, and sexier than my memories ever manage to capture. I fall in love with him again every time I read them.
It really is a strange situation, to have perfect transcripts of so many conversations with your beloved; that’s not how it usually goes. I don’t have that with E; if something were to happen to him (god forbid), I would have to rely on memory alone. Don’t think that doesn’t worry me; it does. The fact that I have this record is one of the things that make me think that this was destined. They told me he had advanced heart disease, and things he told me make me suspect that the symptoms might’ve started appearing not long before his wife asked for the divorce, 4 1/2 years before we met . Sometimes I think that maybe he’d been "scheduled" to die sooner, but then he met me and hung on for a couple more years so that he could experience being loved by a woman who truly adored him before he left. Sometimes I think that we were on borrowed time from the start. Why else would two people so obviously meant to be together have been pulled apart? Why would they have lived in two different states, and learned to love each other despite the distance? Was it practice for now, when we are separated by a distance surmounted only by my own death? Why would the perfect woman (by his own reckoning) for him be married to someone else? Was it so that she would not be left alone and without support when he ultimately had to leave? Had I been single, I would’ve moved to California and would now be totally alone there, with no family and friends, with his gang ignoring me at close range rather than at comfortable distance. Instead, I had someone I loved who loved me there to hold my life together when I was incapable of doing it myself.
In any case, I have his words and do not have to rely on my memories alone. Sometimes I like to reread them, to visit with him. I am always amazed at how recent those conversations seem to me. Not a single one of them is more recent than 2 years and change. Some are 4 years old, and yet…
But I haven’t gone into this archive of our love nearly as often as I imagined early on that I would. For awhile, I told myself it was because I didn’t want to read through it all now—this treasure had to last me the rest of my life, and I needed to ration it for myself for potentially another 60 (gulp) years. I don’t know if that’s actually true, though. It may be that the reality of that connection was just so good that recognizing it again, and acknowledging again that I’ve lost it, hurts too damn much. So I avoid getting my fix that way too often, because while the high is incredible, the crash is killer.
Today, I reread just two e-mails, from that first autumn, and was stopped from reading further by my tears. Because I see again that he was sweeter, funnier, more profane, more sarcastic, more thoughtful, and sexier than my memories ever manage to capture. I fall in love with him again every time I read them.
And therein lies the problem, you see.
I have nothing really tangible left of Will. A few post its. Some cards. Our daughter doesn’t count because she is a DNA legacy and not his thoughts/words frozen in a moment. There are photos. But I can barely pull feeling from them.
With Rob I have saved all our early correspondance and IM. (he has them too). I am afraid though that if something were to happen - I would use those things to ground myself in time. Things like that are only healthy when we are or when much, much time has passed and they are truly part of our past. My opinion only.
About the time issue and being together. Will was dying the day I met him. In retrospect there were many signs that his illness was already in play. Our time together was destined to be short and I was his happily ever after (both people don’t get one and sometimes neither does).
I don’t think fate/destiny/god/whatever cares much about our time tables or worries if we are in the middle of something else. When the moment arrives - for whatever is on slate - then it has arrived.
I don’t believe in institutionalized religion (because it is mainly about power and control) but I have spent much of my adult life watching for signs and asking for guidance and consequently have nearly always been where I was supposed to be - maybe not estatically happy - but happiness is not the point. Learning is. Sharing is.
A found you (or you him) when it was necessary and you were blessed to be his happily ever after (bitter irony there, eh? the blessing thing) Perhaps the emails and such are meant to be for something over than just memories now?
I only have a few e-mails from Shelley. I have some saved voice messages too, although most of those are in the last year and you can “hear” her declining health as though messages progress towards the day she died.
What I do have, though, is every card she ever got me (Birthdays and Christmas, mostly - and she had a knack for picking just the “right” card) and any letters that she wrote to me during those few times when I would be away from home for weeks or months.
You just never think in terms of “this is going to end sooner rather than later”. Until you experience it, you always think “we’ve got all the time in the world”. It’s very crushing to learn - first-hand - that you don’t have as much time as you thought you would.