July 12th would have been our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary. In the seven years since Rick died, I’ve gone through many different stages of grief, and I’m a different woman than that distraught widow from years ago. Instead of sadness over his death, I more often look back feeling thankful for experiencing our life together. Instead of constant grief triggers that can leave me despondent for days, I have fond memories that make me smile, or even laugh, when I remember some fantastic experience we shared.
I was reminded of how far I’ve come a few days ago, when I was brought to tears reading Alice Hoffman’s latest novel, The Invisible Hour. That’s not unusual. She’s always been one of my favorite writers because she has such a beautiful way with words. Her writing is magical, and her stories are filled with magnificent portrayals of what it is to love and to be loved. This passage about a pair of lovers who were spending what would probably be their last night together brought me to tears:
Life can be long or short, it is impossible to know, but every once in a while an entire life is spent in one night, the night when the windows are open and you can hear the last of the crickets’ call, when there is a chill in the air and the stars are bright, when nothing else matters, when a single kiss lasts longer than a lifetime, when you do not think about the future or the past, or whether or not you are walking through a dream rather than the real world, when everything you have always wanted and everything you are fated to mourn forever are tied together with black thread and then sewn with your own hand, when in the morning, as you wake and see the mountain in the distance, you will understand that whether or not you’ve made a mistake, whether or not you will lose all that you have, this is what it means to be human.
Wow! All that passion in one sentence! And after reading that and crying for a while over the loss of those passionate nights and that kind of love, I realized that every widow will relate to this because she understands having “everything you have always wanted and everything you are fated to mourn forever.”