(Thoughts gleaned over the three days from anniversary of wedding to anniversary of Kate’s death)
At this very moment I am sitting at the Barnes & Nobel with a box of Rice Krispie Treats. On this day (June 7th) I married my soul-mate in 1997. There are some people who don’t understand what that really means. My soul-mate was someone who understood me in almost every way possible. I was transparent to her. She knew my thoughts often before I thought them. There were numerous times that we just simply read each other’s mind. If we were in a crowded room, we could look at each other and seemingly know what the other was thinking and we would laugh. And often times others would look at us confused and wonder what was the joke that they missed. There were times that I would call her asking what she wanted for a meal and hoping she would say, “SONIC” or “ARBY’S” or “PIZZA” or something else and she would say just what it was that I was craving, without me every voicing any possible hint. To paraphrase the movie Jerry McGuire, “She completed me.” So 13 years ago today, we stood before family, friends, and God and spoke those most awesome of words. “I DO!” Truth be told, there are some people who cannot understand how I could be married and I AM gay. They think that one (our marriage) or the other (me being gay) must have been a lie! They don’t understand how a gay man could be married to a woman and honestly, truthfully, enjoy my life. Those people also seem to be the ones that I would be writing this BLOG specifically to - the ones who equate love with sex and can never see a definitive separation between the two.
You see, there is a reason why I call Kate my soul-mate. Because I believe that for some reason, we were connected at a spiritual level. There are those in my circle of family (Those who I am related to by blood and those who I have chosen as part of my family) who have told me that there can be several “soul-mates” in one’s life. I don’t know how true that is, I only know that I have had one amazing one who was my other half - my better half - Kate.
So here I am now, thinking back to June 10th 2006. My dad had come over to help me move a new refrigerator into our house that someone was giving us. It was 9:45am and dad was straining at the bit to get over to the place where the refrig was. I heard a crash over at the stove and saw Kate laying on the floor. I told dad to call 911 and I tried to wake her up. Dad came over to try and do CPR. When the EMTs arrived they shocked her 7 times loaded her onto the ambulance without a definitive heart beat and headed to the hospital. When they finally did get a regular heart beat the doctor came out to tell me that there was heart damage and probably brain damage. They transported her upstairs and lost her in the process. Time of death 12:24pm, Saturday, June 10, 2006 - three days after we celebrated our 9th anniversary.
In sharing with a friend and fellow colleague in Ministry who also suffered loss, I told her that when I would go to the grief counseling sessions I would be so jealous of those people who had been married 30, 40 and even 50 years. They got to have time with their partners that I never got. They got to experience the ups and downs of marriage that I will never get. They got a lifetime and I only got 9 years! Of course, that 9 years isn’t counting the previous 15 years where we first developed our close friendship. And that causes me to wonder if those people who had 30, 40, and 50 year marriages got to know their partners to the depth that I got to know Kate! So maybe I did get to know a lifetime with Kate - a lifetime that was contained within 9 short years.
So, here I am remembering what would have been my 13th anniversary of marriage to my soul-mate and remembering the 4th anniversary of Kate’s death, and somewhere in between those two numbers sits a lifetime of memories of togetherness, possibilities un-experienced, grief yet to be lived, and a love that was unbounded. I wish I could say that I have answers to all of this, but I don’t. I wish I could say that I am coming out on the other side a better man, but I’m not even sure of that. What I am sure is that, just as I began living one day, one hour, one minute, one second one step after another that moment that Kate died, I have continued to live that way unto and including this very moment in my life. It is the only way I can live. The past is nothing but death and the future is nothing but unknown. And so I take one small tiny step into that unknown moment shine the light of my experiences on it to make it familiar and then take one more step. What else can I do?
I remember sometime after Kate’s death telling my dad that I was in such confusion because I wanted everyone to know the depth of love I felt with Kate and for Kate and yet I wouldn’t wish this kind of pain (the grieving of loss) upon my worst enemy. In Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam A.H.H.” he penned those famous of all words about love, “I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost; Than never to have loved at all.” And yet, knowing what I know now, and feeling what I do every single time I think about Kate and the love we shared, I have to wonder if Tennyson really understood love. Incidentally, Tennyson wrote those words about the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. If Tennyson had experienced the kind of love I had with Kate, would he still say such words? Would he still think that lost love is better than no love at all when the lost love comes with such deep agonizing pain? I doubt it.
And yet, I do understand, even if for a microscopic moment how this pain is forcing me to grow. I have done a lot of things over the past 4 years from the result of that pain. And I will continue to act and react from that pain throughout my life. And I can already hear my friends telling me that such action isn’t good. But they are not me and they will never know just what it is I experience until, God forbid, they experience the same loss in their lives.
So here I sit in between 13 years and 4 years looking back at the past and looking forward into the future wondering what it is I will discover because of this tumultuous experience. Only God knows for sure and trust me, She isn’t saying! I know because I continue to ask Him! - Blessings always - David L.
