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Our Little Life
To Carolin Combs (d. 26 JAN 07)
(I’m writing this to you in the absence of my therapist, Dr. Raymond Stovich.)
Last nite I wailed & wept over you, shouting "I loved you! I loved our little life!" as I sat at this keyboard on a dark & relatively cold late Novermber evening here in Santa Clara (CA).
People are telling me that getting thru the holidays will be hard for me after your death. Actually, it’s every dark cold night, because I fall back into the cold nights at One Sunset Road (Wellesley Square, MA) when I came back from the bookstore (Barnes & Noble, downhill) & you were making dinner, or when I lay in the pink bedroom under the pink quilt (I still have it, of course) looking into the livingroom where you watched TV in the bright light. I felt safe, cared for, coupled & domestic.
I thought it would last forever, or at least, until I died. I never imagined that you would die before I did. Now that you have, I feel terribly alone now, tho Reggie (our Maine Coon cat) is here beside me, fulfilling your charge that I care for "the minor cat." I do, I am, but I miss you, achingly - every day, every evening, every nite.
What I took for granted, among so many other things, was our simple domesticity, our “little life” together, that sustained me for so many years (1979-2004, with an interruption in 1984-5, all my fault, which I will forever apologize for to you.) You were my hope & my life. I now know that like I never did before. I know that in a way that I never expected or wanted to, but now it fills me with an ache I can’t escape. Even your voice in my right ear cannot stop it.
I’ve crossed a pond of grief on stepping stones – daily regimens that people told me would help me recover – until I finally slipped & fell off. I’m standing in the dark, chilly water now, shivvering over losing you & our little life. I refuse to measure its scale ultra-positively because it’s always recallable from the past as our struggling little platform of domesticity, owed entirely to you. I loved you; I loved our little life. I still do. I always will; in this life & our next. - Bill
Reading your words the cold water eddies, clearing a view into your little life, and I, with only a small sadness to offer in balance as you cross.