Here and Now

Soon after we got married, my Papa Dude passed away. My grandparents had been married for 62 years, and I was there the night he died with my grandma laying beside him telling him it was okay for him to go. It was the most beautiful and the saddest thing I had ever experienced. He was her best friend, her life. They had the perfect love and marriage. They had been through everything together, even the death of their last child. After he died, I became very upset not just with his death, but because it really showed the reality of my own marriage. Yes my motto was to live for today, but by forcing myself to believe that I never thought of how my own life would be without Don. I became overwhelmed with the thought of losing him. The thought that if we both lived very full and long lives, I would live about 20 years of my life without him haunted me. This thought was unbearable when I would see my grandma, who still to this day begs for her time on earth to be over because she misses him so much. I remember reading a book called “The Time Traveler’s Wife”. It was a beautiful book about a time traveler that falls in love with one woman throughout his life. Because he is a time traveler he ends up falling in love with her at all different ages. He couldn’t control when he time traveled, so he never could control when he left her or when he would see her again. When I read this book I felt the desperation that they felt not knowing how long they had together. I remember when I finished the book I was in the back yard of our new house on a blanket with Don and I cried while he held me. And the more he held me, the more I cried. How could I live without him? In the book, the woman’s sole comfort was the child that they had together. When she looked at her, she saw him and could feel his prescence. The child was a piece of him, the culmination of their love for each other, even after he was gone. The more and more I thought of this, the more and more I longed for child of our own. After a while, I realized it was definitely not healthy or beneficial to focus on the negative aspects of our situation, besides, we knew all this going into it. There was a quote in the book that really struck a cord with me, and I often think about it.

"What is it? My dear?"

"Ah, how can we bear it?"

"Bear what?" "This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?"

"We can be quiet together, and pretend – since it is only the beginning - that we have all the time in the world."

"And every day we shall have less. And then none."

"Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?"

"No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere."– A.S. Byatt, Possession

This now has become my theme for us, and I have tried to focus on the here and now. I have failed miserable at this at times. There are times when I think we will never have a family, something will happen to him and I will be left here alone. I am sure everyone thinks of that at some point.