From Sharon’s Blog:
I have to admit the fact. He is gone. Forever in this life. Gone from my touch, my hearing, all my senses. It is a particular loneliness to face that change. For when you are intimately connected and married to someone your senses intermingle and all of the ways the body goes about connecting the other become fixed: routines get established at a very visceral and I am sure cellular and sub-cellular level. Phermones are just a hint of how lovers hook up their senses to one another.
So I am adrift from all that now, but some part of me is still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the sameness, the routines, the regularity, the indivisibility of our accumulated oneness to reassert itself and demand that I conform and get back into the routine.
No matter, though, it won’t and can’t work. I am but a fragment now of what that oneness had become, a solitary interloper on a strange new planet.
I am making a few new connections, feeling my boundaries and oneness now as an individual in ways that surprise me. I can see that I can go on, even alone, the rest of my days. My mother did that when she lost my father. I can feel a deep commonality with her now. My empathy for her grows as I have assumed a taste of some of the shoes she has walked in.
I understand now, even more, her fierce independence and irascibility that sometimes threw me for a loop. I would think we would be doing fine, that she was comfortable with some aspect of her life with me, and then she suddenly would take a right turn just when I was expecting her to go straight ahead. No wonder. Muscles need to be stretched, heart muscles and head muscles are no exception.
The truth is, of course, that I would like to find a nice replacement for Lewis. Someone who loves me much as he did, who has many of his qualities, who is a great companion, and who is a stimulating person with unique strengths to bear in a relationship. I don’t mind quirkiness, and I don’t expect a saint. Largeness of heart is my most important criterion.
Let us hope that I am able to put out the kind of positive energy and attentiveness that will encourage such a relationship to grow.
If it doesn’t, I won’t be any worse for the wear.
And I am sure I’ll be OK and find my way no matter the way this goes.
Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know….
Just ask Forrest.
