From All Those Years Ago

               

                                    From all those years ago

 

             I don't talk about this much, but when I was 20, and in college, I got married during the Summer break. We had two close friends accompany us as witnesses, and went to a lovely country church.  We'd had all the premarital counseling, and then to a reception of sorts at a favorite inn before going home to our very first apartment. Just a couple of weeks later, I returned to college for my final year.

                 We both had some things in common. We both enjoyed international and domestic travel. We both had problems at home, from which each of us were seeking an escape. I did well in the last year of college, and then, we had planned that I would work while he completed his final year.  However, in that first year of marriage, even when the pressure was off, he wasn't thrilled about following through with our plans and completing college.  I had been serious about being married and so when I saw there were some problems, fairly quickly, we entered marital counseling.  Some of it worked and some of it left us realizing that we were poorly suited for one another in a number of respects and had very different expectations of life in general.

                 Eventually, we moved out of state, and he did not adapt particularly well there. I won't go in to additional detail because I believed then, and now, that when you were married to someone, you owe them silence on the subject of their failings and shortcomings.  We had an amicable divorce.

                  In the years that followed, he turned up like a friend from time to time. He was generally supportive of my remarriage, and he was probably relieved not to have the responsibilities, as my husband and I had four children.  My husband would occasionally help him when he had a question about his car or by explaining something a mechanic had said to him.  Eventually, he moved back to his home state, and from the occasional card, we gathered that he was happy there, and things were going as expected. Then, the cards stopped.

                  Those years were busy and so I didn't worry too much when the cards stopped.  I had built a life after him, and I hoped he had done the same. I actually thought he had probably built a life with someone else, just as I had, and that we were simply not important enough to keep contact, and that was okay.  Then, the years passed. The kids grew up, attended college, each of my parents passed, and then my youngest son died suddenly. I thought it a little strange that no matter how much went wrong in my life, that no one I'd known was in touch with him or ever let him know.  I did think it was strange that we hadn't gotten a card from him.  

                    It took all I had to recover from the losses of those years, and one of the ways I did that was to write.  My first two books were published and released in 2012, and a total of six have been released following that time. By now, not hearing from my former husband had to be deliberate. He couldn't possibly be dead. I remembered his social security number and so I ran it through the death registry, and it wasn't there, and so he had to have been alive somewhere.  More years passed, and we heard nothing, and the relatives he had that I knew, were dead.

                     Almost a year ago, we lost our thirty two year old son, some hours after a flu vaccine.  We also lost a number of friends and acquaintances during the COVID era, some of which followed their COVID injections. Within the backdrop of this terrible loss, I began to touch base with many friends I hadn't heard from in some time.

                    Eventually, I contacted a cousin of my former husband.  I learned that after he moved back to the Northeast, that he learned that he had a very rare type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.  From the outset, his chances of recovery or survival were not good, and so he focused on palliative rather than curative care. He also didn't share much about his condition to very many people while trying to enjoy the time he had remaining.  Eventually, he had a controversial surgery, and was left for the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He spent the remainder of his life in a nursing home. Two close friends from high school were there for him. I am told that they asked a number of times I he wanted me to be contacted, but he never did, and he was quite clear on this.

                    He died in 2006, long before either of my parents or my sons, Daniel or Matthew, died. He has been gone from the Earth for years, and I never knew. I never even had an inkling, which is so very strange because I am the woman who knew when my daughter had been in a car accident, when she was merely five minutes late home from work. (I had simply seen a picture of her in my head, that she was very frightened, while driving.) I didn't even feel his absence from the Earth in all those years. 

                      Life moves quickly. Make sure that you stay in touch with those who were important in your life. I had always hoped that he would reach a point in his life where he would want a marriage and then find someone who would share his interests. It makes me sad that this likely did not happen for him. I also hate the thought that he suffered, even though I hear that he closed out his life on his own terms, as much as was possible. May he rest in peace.