True Love

The night I met my love, my wife, I knew I would.

It had been a year and a half since my first wife died. In those years before she died, I expected grief to be all pain, but it wasn’t. I found I could keep myself company, and pay attention to myself throughout the hard moments and that, if I did, they passed pretty quickly. I found that putting my hands in the dirt and on the piano keys soothed me. I found that singing was sometimes all I needed to feel a deep sense of solace.

So that night, thinking I was ready for love again, knowing that it was now, frightened me. I put off going out, took a long bath and went, just myself, to the sushi bar. I had never had a sense of foreknowledge like this, and, though I didn’t really trust it, I couldn’t shake it.

I arrived at the salsa dancing party late. This was unfortunate, since I actually needed the lesson they offered at the beginning. Everyone had found someone to dance with, and I stood awkwardly on the side, not sure what to do. The woman running the night noticed me, the wallflower on the side. She drew me over to the chairs, and asked one of the women sitting there, “will be her partner?”. Slight hesitation and then she said yes.

It’s hard to stay objective about the first time you lay eyes on a great love. She says for her, it was love at first sight. It took me until our first dance finished up.

There’s nothing sensible about that kind of love. It hits you like a thunderstorm, insisting on itself! Yet ultimately, there is nothing more sensible! We hardly danced that night, because we were so busy talking. Three subjects dominated our conversation; death (she had lost her father a few months before I lost Joanne), children (motherhood for me, aunthood for her), and spirituality (as opposed to religion). At one point, she said, “I practice a sort of Christian, Buddhist, Native American kind of thing,” and I thought, “this could work!”

We stayed until the dancing ended, and then I invited her to the sweat lodge I was part of. She had been looking for one. She gave me every number she had (I think there were 4) and I gave her mine (I didn’t have as many).

Yes, we knew right away. She went home and emailed her friend, “I’m in trouble and she has children!” I went home and, when my teenager missed her curfew, I let it slide and told her, “you lucked out because I met someone tonight.” The next day, at lunch with my parents, I told them I had met someone who was going to be important.

Nearly fourteen years later, I am no less sure. I have had the great honor of exchanging vows with my beloved 3 times (doing our part for the gay marriage thing). We have parented together, prayed together and mopped the floor, painted the living room and gone to school meetings ad infinitum. I do not take this life for granted. I know in my soul, through experience, that loss is inevitable and we have each other for just a brief time, even if it is a lifetime. So every day, even when I’m mad or tired or just plain cranky, I know I am lucky.

I wrote a song a little while after we met called, “Lightening Striking Twice.” The odds against that are just as long as the odds against two great loves in a lifetime. But I have been that blessed, to have loved and been loved to the very depths twice in my life. I will never take my wife for granted. I will treasure her for as long as I am given, and beyond.

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