More Or Less

At a recent social function, I struck up a conversation with this elderly gentleman... we had something in common: he lost his beloved wife to cancer approximately a two years ago.

It was great to listen to the man's stories of his family, his life - he has four grown children (three daughters and one son), nine grandchildren, and a wide spectrum of friends and other relationships he had accumulated over his sixty-four years. He and his wife met when they were both teenagers, and because it was pretty much "love at first sight" they ended up getting married right away - and the rest is history, as they say.

He confided in me how his life had completely turned on its ear at the death of his wife. It was a fairly quick illness - I gathered that she had not been feeling well, but being a typical woman and mother, hid her pain from her family most of the time - so when the cancer was diagnosed, it was pretty much a done deal. I could hear the anguish and loss in his voice as he spoke of it, and it resonated in my own battered soul. I listened, and then I told the gentleman that I knew exactly how he felt.

This comment of mine stopped the man short. His reaction to me was that "I couldn't possibly know how he felt" because I was only married to my husband for five years whereas he and his wife were together over fifty... He wasn't attacking me; merely sympathetic - I felt like a snot-nosed kid being patted on the head, given a cookie and sent on her way. Our situations were COMPLETELY different, from his perspective.

Later on, I reflected on what the gentleman had told me. How is it that the number of years has any relevence to the depth of one's loss of love? Does that mean that people who are maybe engaged and never actually are able to get married (and somebody dies) don't really feel the same things I feel? That this man clearly feels?

Those are just circumstances... each person's circumstances are different, of course, but I don't think I could have felt any more devastated if the Bunny and I were together fifty years instead of just five. If anything, I feel cheated because I don't have a lifetime of memories. I don't have my husband's children and grandchildren for me to look at and interact with every day. I don't see anything in our life together that - given enough time - isn't going to disappear completely from MY life. One day I will wake up, and all outward traces of the Bunny will be eliminated - except for my feelings. Except for my love... and my sadness. And every so often I will relive a memory or hear a song on the radio or hear the Bunny's voice in my head and it will put me back in touch with that love and sadness. And maybe I'll shed a few tears, and the next day I will feel better.

Those are MY circumstances. But the love in question - regardless of the shelf life - is universally the same.