Life without her

This is the sort of thing I only think about when I’m Robyn isn’t around. I’m not capable of it at any other time.

It’s when she and the kids are already in bed, and I’ve returned to the night-owlish tendencies of my younger days, drawn to the silence of the night. Or I’m driving home from work in the winter time when dusk hits early and I can’t get comfortable with music or nobody’s around to talk on the phone. 

I’m protected from all this when I’m with her, because the thought of having to live without her seems implausible, because she’s right there. I can hold her hand, or laugh with her, or give her a peck on the cheek just because. I never end up thinking about this when I’m with her because she’s right.

Even before my father went ahead, I would think about this sometimes. But his passing made it more frequent and sharper, because now I can’t pretend like Robyn going ahead to the next world before me is an impossibility. It’s what my mom and a few of my aunts and uncles are living through now - life without their partners. It’s more likely that I’ll pass before Robyn; the numbers say average life expectancy for someone like me is shorter than for someone like her. But we can’t know either way. 

I’ve wondered, often, two things: why do I even let myself think about this, and, does anyone else let themself think about this?

Life without your partner is among the 3-5 most painful things one can think about. It’s up there with burying a child, global nuclear war, or some damning ecological catastrophe - like what plays out in the movie Interstellar. It would be more comfortable to distract myself until the thought passed, or hid behind not-actually-validated probabilities and feed myself a line like, “odds are I won’t have to worry about this for a long time.”

And yet, I still think about this. I let the thought and the pain it brings wash through me like a flu-season’s fever. I let the thoughts run their course. I let myself think about the worst case scenario - life without Robyn - because I tell myself it’s “preparation” in case it actually happens. As if thinking about it in advance and living through it in my head will actually prepare me for what would likely be the worst days of my life. I let the thought cut deep enough into my core, so that I can feel it enough and then I cry. Then I let the fever break, and my mind comes home.

Contemplating this type of “what if…” is not polite conversation. It’s not something that “comes up.”

It’s a topic that’s weirdly a cultural anathema, the most unnatural of conversations, yet perhaps one of the most “natural” of topics because death is a natural certainty. Even now, I’m squeamish, and trying to avoid actually naming “the topic” - how to deal with your spouse dying, there I said it - as if it was the dark wizard in Harry Potter’s world, not to be named.

I can’t be the only one that thinks about this. I can’t be the only one thrashed by the question that any of us living in a union face: which of us is going to go ahead first?

I wonder about this so often. Am I the only one haunted by this? How does everyone else deal with it? Do you let the fever wash through you, too? Do you talk about it with your wife? Do you write about it in a journal that’s hidden away as if it didn’t exist? Do you try to dilute and delude yourself of the thought by hiding behind shadowy probabilities as I do? Is there some other way to prepare for the pain? Is there some other way?

Late in life, my father had to move to Seattle to find engineering work. He loved it there. I always think about how he described the place. “It is cloudy or rains six days of the week, and the seventh day makes the others worth it.” My father had a great appreciation for the extremities of life - suffering and joy, peace and chaos, love and loneliness. He understood that we must confront difficult truths to truly live. 

Pain reminds us to laugh, to love, to appreciate time and not waste it, to be kind and humble, to focus our time on what matters. My father understood this and subtly reminded me throughout my life that a man who doesn’t know clouds and rain and snow, cannot possibly value the full splendor of the sun.

This to me is the silver lining of this unhealthy tendency I have to think about the painful notion of life without Robyn. She is my wife, my love, my soul’s counterpoint in the universe. When we’re apart, like we were this weekend, I really feel the gut wrenching pain of it.

And because of that pain, I am grounded enough to value the everyday, miraculous beauty of what it will be for her to walk through that door and be back in our arms again.

Dreams, from joy and the conviction of their own souls

Raking leaves is one of those chores I don’t want to do until I’m doing it.

Until I’m with rake in hand, I’ve forgotten the crispness and soft chill of the air, and the sound of the brushing leaves. It’s sweatshirt weather. But I also forget that sweatshirt weather is also “thinking weather.”

As I raked yesterday, I escaped to thinking about dreams. And my subconscious drew me not to thinking about what my dreams are, but rather, “what influenced me to have the particular dreams that I do?” And for me, so much of my dreams are wrapped up into my parents’ dreams for me.

To be a “big man” or a man of great community respect. And I wondered why they had those dreams for me, and I think it must have been, at least in part, because of how they were treated when they arrived in this country. As immigrants, I don’t imagine they ever felt accepted or welcomed, at least for the first few decades of their arrival.

And when you’re an “outsider” respect and wealth protects you from harm - whether that is rude service or dirty looks in public, or more unfortunately, a brick through your window. I imagine my parents’ pain is something that influenced me to want the dreams that I wanted early in life. Pain is a powerful influence.

But my dreams were also influenced by the broader culture whose collective opinion skews toward a hedonistic, lowest common denominator and accepted malaise . Let’s call those the dreams of “the herd”.

The herd wants me to hold its dreams as my own, because it’s a mechanism of justification. It’s harder to criticize the herds hedonistic aspirations if they convince me (and others) to be part of it. The more people the herd co-opts, the more their dreams - however dishonorable they may be - become normal. Just like pain, the herd is a powerful influence.

So early in life my dreams were influenced by two things, avoiding pain and succumbing to the herd’s mentality. That’s where “I want to be a Senator” or a “social entrepreneur” came from - those were two dreams that pain and the herd led me, specifically, to.

And I’ve let go of those dreams, not because I grew out of those dreams, but because I grew out of pain and the herd’s mentality. Mostly through luck and blessing, some very special friends and family helped me to discover joy and my own soul. It’s a journey less like climbing a mountain, and more like a long, lonely walk.

It’s a journey I am still on, but my dreams are now about a growing family, goodness, the honor of public service, and sacrifice for a community bigger than myself. I still fall into the traps laid before me by pain and the herd, I am after all a mortal man. But these dreams - borne of joy and what lies within the core of me - are a far cry from the version of myself that was nakedly ambitious, longing to be on the Crain’s 20 in their 20’s list.

Honestly though, the point isn’t about me, nor should it be.

The point is this: I can only hope - for our children, and the children of our friends, family, and neighbors - that the generation up next spends less of their life having their dreams influenced by pain and the herd than I did. I hope, deeply, that more of their dreams, and really their lives, are instead influenced by joy and the convictions of their own soul.

Here’s how I’ve been thinking about how we do that.