Unfinished Stories :: If All Goes Well

Image by Jazzbeaunola. Sourced via Flickr. Used with permission.

I may be a hopeless romantic but honestly, aren’t we all?

“I’m doomed,” my husband says to me, reaching for my hand as we walk across the parking lot.

“Doomed?” I ask him.

“Yeah,” he says, and sighs. “Doomed.”

I know what he means, and I give his hand a little squeeze. Today, it makes me giggle just a bit, but I know someday it will be the source of grief that sits heavy in my heart and leaves me wondering if I can even swing my legs over the side of the bed to face another day.

Falling in love is such a risk. Stepping into marriage is a gamble — better to have loved and lost, and all that. If all goes well, and the couple survive the terrible twos and taxes and a mortgage and life’s unexpected tragedies and teens and progress and setbacks and family vacations and work done well and Thanksgiving and cutting the grass and retirement and illness, there’s still “‘til death do us part.” If all goes well, in the end, one of us will grieve the loss of the other. Yes. We are doomed.

It’s a silly side effect of love.

:::

We are headed — Wayne, my husband, and I — to a dinner for graduates and alums. Wayne wears a navy blue, polyester sport coat. The hems of his trousers barely skim the tops of his black oxford shoes. When he walks, the years betray his stories in a hesitant and halting gait. But who really notices, what with that smile of his?

Wayne is the kind of person whose smile lets the whole world in. At first, I get defensive in the presence of a smile like that. I don’t trust such kindness in a person. I hold the smile suspect, telling you way more about me than about the person casting his kind smile in my direction.

He is, indeed, a kind, kind man. His soul is warm and rich; a soft place to land for those fortunate enough to share a car ride or an alumni dinner in a church basement at a round table covered in white linen. I am smitten and I ask him questions and he is generous with his story. And when the speaker of the evening takes the podium, Wayne’s back is to the stage, so he turns his chair and I am left to gaze at the back of his head, the slow slope of his shoulders beneath the polyester blue, the way he tilts his head just one degree to the left. I find myself lifting the tablecloth to peek at his feet, those oxford shoes of his placed flat on the floor on the indoor/outdoor carpet in the basement of that church.

:::

In the car, on the way home, Wayne tells me about Alice. She had been the love of his life. He tells me how they met in church when they were both young, and living in New York City. She was a spitfire from the south. He was from the south, too, but calmer and gentler. Alice taught him how to drink sweet tea and eat collard greens, and she wouldn’t tolerate belittling people. Not for any reason. They were a good match. And they fell in love.

They got married, and Alice got a job as a school teacher. She had to ride the subway to work in the city, and one day she couldn’t get enough water. No matter how much water she drank, she was still thirsty, so she went to the doctor and learned to inject herself with insulin. Every day. For decades.

In the car, while my husband drives, I sit on the very edge of the back seat, leaning my elbow on the console between the two front seats. Wayne is turned just a bit to his left in the front passenger seat, so he can look me in the eyes while he tells me about Alice and the family they raised together, and he is smiling that smile of his and he’s got me.

Alice has been gone three years, and I miss her even though I’ve never met her for myself.

I wonder how a person does it. How do you carry on after losing someone you have loved so deeply?

“Oh,” Wayne says, “you just do.”

My husband parks the car, and Wayne eases himself out, and I watch him walk that glorious walk of his — hesitant and halting. Of course, I think of Jacob, who held on tightly ‘til he got his blessing, and then walked away with a limp.

[ts_fab]