Happily Ever After

In fairytales the virtuous (or the survivors) have the reward of living "happily ever after". Compare that with a comment C. S. Lewis makes in "A Grief Observed", that death is a natural part of every relationship. If you are with someone you love, then you are guaranteed to be separated by death at some point in the future.

In the first year or two we were married, Jen regularly had nightmares that I'd been killed in an accident. Perhaps behind that was the recognition that she'd changed the direction of her life to be with me, moved cities, left friends behind. If I died she'd lose the reason for being where she was (which was usually connected to the job I was doing). So the discussions we had over time were about how she'd survive without me, whether my superannuation would be enough to live off etc. Jen was always more of a worrier, whereas I was generally content to deal with the events that did happen. The irony of course was that Jen died instead, and it was only after she was diagnosed that we began, painfully, to imagine my future without her.

It is said that now death is the great taboo that we shield ourselves from considering. Yet in every marriage that is not ended by divorce, there will be a moment like mine: sitting holding Jen's hand in a dim room, and waiting for her to stop breathing. For others it might be seeing the ambulance drive off. For another friend, it was having the police turn up at the front door to give the bad news. I find it sobering to realise that my experience was one of the better ones possible - I just wish it was about 50 years later on.

The challenge is how we can best love people when we know we're going to lose them. From the moment of Jen's diagnosis, time was always going to relatively short, probably measured in months rather than years. So there was an intensity to our experience. I stopped working in the evenings almost completely, so we could enjoy the time (as much as one can with five months of chemo, anyway). We had only one or two arguments in the whole ten months - not that we'd been arguing a lot before then, but there was an unspoken consent that we didn't want to waste time on the selfishness and trivialites and impatience that are at the heart of many arguments. I don't mean of course everything was perfect, but just that we tried much harder to care for each other in the time we had left.

The difficulty is that it's hard to preserve that intensity of love, that changed perspective, when the time we have with someone might easily be decades rather than days. In long-term relationships it's probably important that we do argue at times if the alternative is a pretense of agreement. How do we then make every day count?

I have moments of imaging that after Jen's death, nothing as bad will happen again. The reality is that I will one day lose everyone I love -- children, family and friends -- by my death or theirs. There have been many times in the last ten months when I seem to be just scraping through the days, patience wearing thin, not even paying much attention to those close to me. My aim instead should be to value each person I love and every day I have.