LOVE AFTER LOVE

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writers’ musings:

……………………’narrative becomes montage’………………………..

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LOVE AFTER LOVE

Oh yes.  He says it splendidly, Derek Walcott, in his poem titled:  LOVE AFTER LOVE.  Don’t forget - I am a widow.  I am in lockstep with the man, with his poem about love after love.  He is expressing what I have come upon, come towards.  Someone, someone like Jung, one of those 20th century psychological thinkers, said:  ‘When all else fails, there is the self.’

I must modify that for myself, though - because there was no failure.  There was only finality through the agency of my mate passing on, leaving me to live with myself, be with myself, acknowledge myself.  I cannot tell you how novel this was for me, considering the fact that I was interconnected with said mate really since age seventeen.  My entire adult life.  Sixty years.  Amazing.

The loss of him is permanent and profound.  I am now in my fifth year of solitariness.  There are times when I long for him, for his half that made us the whole that we were, for all the vaporous moments of coupledom that have evaporated, never to be lived again.  Worldly matters that I ache to share with him.  Comic moments that I so badly want to laugh about with him.  Family matters that I want him to know.  But this is now the shore I washed up on, and having gotten here I stowed the oars in the canoe and clambered on to this beach and was obliged to set up the lean-to of my own life sans him.

I think I was so SO lucky.  I didn’t know it but I was ready.  You cannot possibly know that beforehand, but I was.  Rather like birthing babies, like parenting those babies: you have no concept until it asks what it asks of you.  Venturing.  Adventuring.  I suppose one could place it on a threshold of trust, self-trust - which, by the way, took me years, decades.  The unconscious mind was the prepared or preparing mind, nevertheless.  The dharma of my life has been to meet all this at a good moment.  Thus am I lucky.  I’m also old, let me remind myself.  I cannot imagine it would have been thus earlier.  It would have been something else.  But now, as the man said:

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.*

If I’d written that poem, I think I might have used the word ‘trust’ in place of ‘elation.’

Now the duality is in place.  The irreparable loss,  The absence, the vacuum… and in the face of that, a natural directive to open my eyes each morning, see it all before me.

We know how shocked Joan Didion was to find herself mateless, unmoored.  Same with Joyce Carol Oates.  Those beautiful writers, though, didn’t have the benefit of what I had:  closure.  Their losses were like thunderclaps, sudden bolts of lightning hurled at them in their lives.  How would I be if it had been like that for me?  As I say:  I feel so so lucky.

I can make this an offering to others:  You can do it.  You can.  You can.  Trust.     

‘Today is your day.

Your mountain is waiting.

So get on your way.”

(that one by another sage, Dr. Suess)

*Words of Derek Walcutt

written 2.6.24