Epilogue

March 15, 2016

On the morning of the day before she died, she had a seizure. I went online to try to understand what had happened and what might happen next. She said to me, “Get off that goddamn computer and come to bed. I want you to hold me while I sleep.”

I held her for hours, dozing, praying, wishing. She woke in the night, but never regained consciousness, except for a precious brief moment near dawn when our eyes met.

“Do you know how much I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too, baby,” she said, smiling, looking me right in the eye, and then she drifted away. She died at 11:11am, March 15, 2015.

It’s been one year.

I have a friend who regularly reminds me, “you get one year to grieve, and then you have to move on.” It’s an old fashioned idea that gets a lot of push-back in the form of Facebook wisdom, but I get it. It has little or nothing to do with healthy grieving, and everything to do with social mores. Everybody has a sad story, but after a while, for the common good, you have to stop telling it. Fair enough.

The problem is, any loss that leads to a full year of grief is not just a phase or a series of stages you pass through. It’s transformative. If you get a bad haircut, you move on. Time will heal your pain. If you lose your legs, no matter how well you adjust and compensate, that loss redefines you. It is not an event, like that time you broke your arm. It is the metal spike driven into your personal timeline dividing it into life before and life after. Life after is not necessarily bad, but it is never the same.

Shortly after she died, I found her diary. Most of it was addressed to me, although I had never seen it before. The first entry was written while aboard a plane, on her way to see me for the first time since the first time, pages filled with anticipation, fear, and scatter-brained humor. At one point she wrote, “I don’t know how to explain this love. If I were a scientist I might say this love changed the make-up of my cells, becoming the nucleus of each one.”

In my life before, I used to believe that no one had ever been so in love, no one had ever been so happy. She and I lived and loved with wild abandon. Why we didn’t just burst into flame is a mystery. And when her heart stopped beating, why mine continued is also a mystery. No one had ever loved and been loved so truly and deeply, and no one had ever known such sorrow. Life without her made no sense. My soaring pinnacle had crumbled and left me in a bottomless pit, and I was certain that no one else could possibly fathom my loss.

I was wrong, of course. Not everyone finds a soulmate, but many people do, and they might live lives of wild abandon or maybe lives of quiet affection as best suits them, and then, when the unthinkable happens, one is gone and the other is left behind, torn in half. Not only am I not the only one, but both chapters of that story are so common it’s become a cliché. We are designed to seek happiness, and the need to love and be loved is hardwired into our souls, and then half of us die and half of us don’t. It’s universal, the oldest story in the book.

Somehow, knowing that only made me feel worse. Realizing that what we’d had and what I’d lost wasn’t extraordinary did not bring me solace. The implication that we’ve all been there and done that felt cheap. Everyone lives, everyone loves, everyone dies. Get over it. Move on.

But here’s the deal — the love between two unique individuals is inherently unique. Like snowflakes in a blizzard, love may be everywhere you look, but no two are alike. Countless love-struck couples have shared their most intimate selves ever since Adam snuck a peek behind Eve’s fig leaf, and no two stories have ever been the same.

I think they have, however, all shared at least one common trait. Every couple believes that no one in the history of true love has ever known a love as true or as sweet as theirs, and they are right to think so. Each love story is unlike all the others, and even if that weren’t so, it is somehow in the essence of love to believe that it is, to believe that this love is worth any cost, any sacrifice, because there never has been and never will be another like it. And then, when one is lost and one is left, it brings a darkness and pain too deep for words, a pain unlike any other. Not that he is the first to have known love and loss, but that he is the first to have known that love and that loss.

The final entry in her diary said, “My dear sweet Thom. I love you. If you are reading this, it means something happened to me. Know this, my darling, the love of my life — my last thought was how much I love you, will go on loving you. Always have and I always will.”

After a year of reflection, I have, in some ways, come to terms with my loss. We did indeed have a love the likes of which the world has never known. No one before has ever been there or done that the way we did. I do find some solace in that knowledge.

Even so, now she’s gone and my heart is broken, there’s no two ways about it. I am, sadly, transformed. I am not who I was when I was with her, and I am also not who I was before I was with her. Our love changed the make-up of my cells, and then so did my loss. I am now saturated with sadness, infused with grief. Sorrow rests behind my eyes. It’s there when I’m talking to you, even when I’m laughing. It’s there when I’m at work, when I’m at rest, and when I’m asleep, and it still spills out unexpectedly almost every day. I was re-created by her love, and now I am misshaped by her loss. Love is magical, love is mystical, love is inexplicable. Loss is clinical, unfeeling. It amputates. Love is a dance and I have lost my legs. I will not dance again, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten the music.

I love you Grace, always have. I miss you baby, always will.