A Love Story

A Love Story

My husband of 48 years died 5 months ago today. I have been moving through stages of grief since then, so maybe it’s time to say something outside the space between my ears.

I write love stories for wedding ceremonies for a living. Since everyone is unique, I look for what each of them finds in the other to make this step a good idea. So now I ask myself: what was it that drew me to Tom to say OK on you for the rest of my life?

We lived together two years before we married, so we knew a bit about our habits, our foibles and our assets. In many ways, the original decision to live with Tom was equal to marrying. I was 31, and he was 43, so we had some adult experience under our wings. Tom was not just a body or a personality to be combined with mine. All of that was the clay to play with and mold, but that was the given.

Despite my fear of making mistakes, dread of a future I could never control, I felt something possible with Tom, but with no traditional security. He was possibility. He was the new. On paper he was nothing short of interesting, heroic, bold, imaginative. This was my missing link to a dream of a life I carried inside. Oh, the places you’ll go!

The inner knot of fear and self-doubt was loosened around Tom. I was barely past my twenties and he was middle-aged. He had been a Navy test pilot, parachuted from a plane at 37,000 feet, which put him into the Guiness Book of World Records at the time. His father died when he was five and his mother sent him to an orphanage in Philadelphia when he was eight and he never again lived at home. He won a scholarship to the Wharton School, graduated, went on to Georgetown Law School, and dropped out to retrofit a 90-foot sailboat, taking off for the Caribbean for a year as a sailor.

At the time I met him,

he was publishing his first job-finding book. There would be ten more books in the coming years. And I would become his in-house editor.

There are a thousand ways to tell a love story that spans fifty years, especially with someone like Tom. The achievements and heroics are just one storyline. We raised two sons and lived in Manhattan, Woodstock NY, Boston and finally Central Massachusetts.

But this first story is about possibility. Those 48 years were not easy. Tom was so difficult by summer of 2022, I considered (and threatened) divorce. Who in her right mind divorces a 90- year -old living the last two decades in heart failure?

I’m about to move to Florida, one place I swore as a die-hard northeasterner to never settle. Too hot, too many old people (what?), too glitzy and too crazy right-wing DeSantis.

But in my grieving Tom I remember the best of him, the man I stayed with, supported and encouraged through the toughest times as well as celebrated the truly great moments.

I’m selling and giving away almost everything we had together. I’ll be back in a busy urban city too expensive for me if I stretch my retirement another twenty years (oooh!). I’ll be ten blocks away from my younger son but 1000 miles away from my only grandchild. As Isay this a well of energy bubbles up: sadness? Fear? Anxiety? Dread? Loss? All of that?

Possibility.

Tom’s still thriving place in my heart says just that. Goodbye to the given; hello to the new.

Possibility. Like the cruise ship passengers I will wave to on Biscayne Bay.