The Path to Love Has Turns — Pack a Lunch
I married my boyfriend after dating for 5 years. We met when I was 18 and he was 19. We used to joke that our grandkids would hang from his ears because he inherited large ears from his family. When I had minor surgery when I was 19, we colored together and decided on the name of our future child — Jason. Jason represented some of the months of the year and we thought that was cool. I also had a grandfather who passed away whose name was Joseph so we thought about naming the child after him.
Fast forward nearly 16 years after we met and I decided what I wanted for my 34th birthday. A divorce. I came to that conclusion while driving home from going out with my husband for my birthday — we were in separate cars because he met me in the area where I worked. We had been dealing with a strained relationship for months. Driving home from a mediocre night of unplanned activities — the highlight of which was a visit to a nearby bookstore to look around — I called my friend’s roommate who was a lawyer I’d met a few times, and asked her to represent me in a divorce.
I tried talking, laughing, crying, cajoling, begging and screaming to my husband. We tried going to a therapist — once because as we left the session where the therapist reduced his rate so we could start a ‘good time’ fund to breathe life back into our relationship, my husband told me there was no point. He didn’t know why he didn’t want to be married anymore but he was done. I tried for a year to work things out with him, never knowing what happened. We lived together during our divorce and even afterwards. When he moved out, we rented a truck and moved his things into it. We drove to his new apartment and unloaded the truck before shopping for housegoods for him and going out to lunch. We always loved one another — we just weren’t meant to be marital partners. A year after our divorce, he asked me what happened and wanted to know if we could get back together. I told him no. We have always been like brother and sister to one another, helping each other and caring about one another and that hasn’t changed. We still keep in touch with one another. He is in a hospital in California currently, recovering from a liver transplant — he was diagnosed with liver disease when he was in his 20’s. We used to go to a physician at the University of Miami who treated him. I knew we loved one another and I always thought that indeed, we’d have Jason and that our grandkids would swing from his ears.
Five years after divorcing him, I met a man who made my life feel vibrant — as if someone flipped a lightswitch and everything became TechniColor. I snorkeled with him in an underground cave in Mexico during our honeymoon. I bought a house with him. I joined him when he retraced his childhood steps in the neighborhood where he grew up as we waited a day to surprise his brother for his 60th birthday. I glided him around in a wheelchair after he recovered from a terrible car accident that left him in Grave condition. I threw parties in our house with him. We lived. Until he died. I didn’t see that coming.
Shortly after he died, I met a widower who I wasn’t excited to meet. I didn’t think he was ‘my type’ but he was widowed and I was curious about his experience. I was floating, untethered to the world, and wondered how this widower was getting by. So I agreed to meet him. Had he been divorced, I wouldn’t have accepted his invitation for a date. He turned out to be smart, calm, stable, interesting and intriguing. I found myself lost in time when I was with him. By the third date, we both knew this was magic. He invited me to spend a week in a cabin in northern Florida for his birthday, which was about a month after we started dating. He had booked it previously, determined to live life even if he was widowed. I agreed and we had a great time. It took us nearly 7 hours to drive back to our county and when we arrived, we both said we didn’t want our time together to end. We didn’t want to separate so he could go to his house on the east side of town and me to my house on the west side. So we went to the vet where we boarded our cats and dogs and took them back to my house. He never left. That’s how we decided to live together. We figured if we just spent nearly 7 hours in a car together and didn’t want to kill one another, but instead wanted it to continue, we’d be ok. We got engaged the following month, on my birthday, and we got married a year after that. In 3 days, we’ll celebrate our 3rd wedding anniversary.
So am I where I want to be and did I believe my life would look like this at this point? No. I thought I would marry once and stay married. I never imagined I’d be widowed. I certainly didn’t think that I’d have a husband collection. Or that I’d find such a beautiful love after such a shattering loss. Or, for that matter, that I’d find my job eliminated in my 50’s and decide to back away from full time work and dabble in work per my interests. Until our spouses died, we both thought we’d work until we were 70. Now we’re planning on semi-retirement. My husband will work until the end of June 2021 and join me in this lifestyle. Life is interesting. It has turns that I never saw coming.
