A little while ago a song came on the radio. It was the version of “Cruisin’” with Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow. One of the lines goes like this:
“And if you want it, you got it forever…”
For some reason, tonight that line managed to pierce right through my emotional armor. When I heard it, what immediately popped into my head was, “I don’t believe in forever…yes I do…no I don’t.” Suddenly there were tears in my eyes.
“Forever” feels like a cruel joke when your spouse dies young. I’ve always been a total romantic. I want so much to believe in forever, I really, really do. And I did. But now, well, now I know that you can believe in it all you want, but that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be lucky enough to have it.
I wish I could believe in forever. I’d like to. I want to. But I just can’t anymore.
And even though I’m more in love now than I’ve ever been in my life, the idea of “forever” still makes me sad. Maybe it’s because we’re older, or because I’ve learned the hard way that things really don’t last “forever,” or simply because it is so wonderful with this dear sweet man who loves me so well. I don’t know why, but as hard as I try, as much as I put on my armor to defend against it, I can’t seem to completely escape this deep-down sense that it’s only a matter of time before this has to end too.
Forever is an illusion.
I hate writing that. I don’t want to think that; it’s too depressing. I want to love this man for the rest of my life, for many many more years I hope, as well as for eternity. But even eternity is
complicated now. After all, I’m a widow; my husband and I loved each other for 15-plus years. Who am I supposed to spend eternity with? I want to be with the man I love now, my soulmate. But how will I explain that to my late husband? I don’t want to hurt him. It’s not his fault that he died and I’ve found love again with someone else.
A more down-to-earth question – literally – is this: I bought a two-person cemetery plot 10 years ago when my husband died. There’s a space there with my name on it (not literally, but you know what I mean). But now I want to be buried with the man I love now and expect to love as long as I live (I can’t even write that without adding, “That is, unless he dies before me” – something I never thought about before my 45-year-old husband suddenly dropped dead).
And what if I die before my sweetheart? Even if we agree now that we want to be buried together, I would never want to hold him to that if he moved on with his life and loved again.
This reminds me of an interview I did recently for a Valentine’s Day article. I spoke with a couple in their 30s who earnestly told me that, if anything ever happened to either one of them, they’d promised each other never to remarry. They were convinced that they could never find another love like the one they had together. As the young woman put it, “For us, it’s not ‘until death do us part’ – it’s ‘until we meet on the other side.’”
When I heard this, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, “Don’t make promises that you won’t be able to keep. Things change,” and sharing my own story with them. But I couldn’t do that to them; I wasn’t going to be the one to destroy their lovely dream of “forever.”
I don’t know where I’m going with this. Maybe I just needed to put down in writing how having someone die on you, suddenly and prematurely, messes with your mind – and your heart – irreversibly.
On the other hand, maybe I’m being too concrete about all of this. I do believe in God and I do believe in Heaven; so I have to also believe that this sort of situation has come up before and that God knows exactly how to handle it! After all, in Heaven, no one can feel hurt or unhappy, right? So I surely don’t need to fret about “forever” as far as the afterlife is concerned.
Maybe the purpose of all of these ruminations is just to remind me (again!) that there aren’t any answers and there aren’t any guarantees when it comes to the most important questions in life. So instead of worrying about things that I can’t know, it makes much more sense to focus on today, to thank God for all the good things in my life today.
And if I had to choose, I’d rather appreciate each and every day, the way I do now, than assume that there will always be a “next time” or a “some day” or even a tomorrow. It’s better to be consciously, intentionally and purposefully grateful, right now, for the gifts we’ve been given. I know that I wasn’t wise enough to realize this in the past; maybe we can’t be until we’ve actually experienced a last time.
Intellectually, I understand and believe all of this. I’ve tried to live this way for nearly 10 years now. And yet sometimes, like before when I heard the words of a sweet romantic song, I’m reminded of what that innocent, unspoiled feeling of “forever” used to feel like.
More than that, I’m reminded of how much I miss that feeling.