Between Lara and myself, we have both lived longer without each other than together. Lara was 38 years old when we first met, I was 45. Since then, we were a couple for some twenty years. We both had lives behind us. I still have one in front of me; she no longer does. I am 66 now; she was 59. I have only known her for about one third of her life.
Although that encapsulates our situation mathematically, it doesn't reflect the preponderance of our years together. The twenty years we were granted on earth as a couple, for both of us, were the richest by far.
As probably most couples do who are united later in life, we lived in the present with an eye on the future. Information on what came before, was never exchanged systematically, and awareness back and forth remained episodical. Stories were exchanged which allowed to gain an impression of the 'grandes lignes' of the two lives before our life together, but knowledge was never complete; nor did it need to be. We fell in love the way we found each other in 1991, and how we each got to that point was of lesser import. There was too much else going on in our lives. Good things.
Photographic material was scarce either way. Lara didn't have many pictures as testimony of her first 38 years; what she did have, she showed to me. I had a lot of material but to this day have failed to reclaim it with my ex-wife; so Lara never saw it.
Lara was a poet, and educated as such (see "Luggage" in the previous blog). I know precious little of her exploits in that regard, as she was always brief in talking about it. In a leather binder which I found the other day, I came across poems dedicated to people who must have meant something to her: a Pam, a Lisel, a Joan. I have no idea who these people are and what indeed they meant to her at the time. I could ask friends of Lara's who are still around, but the point is: I cannot ask her.
Several times a day, I follow the same reflex when stuck for an answer about something, but she is no longer around to give me one. From here onwards, whenever I still want to find something that belongs to her, or find out about her, will inevitably be a matter of reconstruction, and second-guessing. Some things will never be known. So many things occur to me now which I should have asked her when she was still with us, but which I failed to put to her over her final weeks at home. I realize now that for all of the time since doomsday (17 April), the day she received the devastating verdict of her impending death, I have lived in a continual state of constricted consciousness. I guess it is a form of denial which shrouded me as a survival mechanism. I wasn't prepared to absorb the enormity of what was about to happen: losing my soul mate. Siblings and kids saw I was 'out of it'. Of course I should have told her things or asked her things that now I no longer can. I missed my chance while it was in front of me, overwhelmed as I was. There I have regrets. They only occurred to me a few days ago, after I had regained some of my usual self again.
Or perhaps I should be satisfied that, just before she went under, two days before she died, I asked her the habitual question - one I must have asked her hundreds of times, about validating her feelings for me. I posed it as I was stretched out beside her on what had become her death bed, our heads joined together, holding hands. "Do you still love me?", I asked. And she gave me the habitual answer, unwavering, with resonating profundity as usual, completing an exchange immensely reassuring in all its brevity. What more is there to say or to ask that matters, really?
"Oh yeah!", she said.
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