What if your spouse died?

Originally appeared on AOL, Thursday, March 5, 1998

Edited, Thursday, February 3, 2000

My wife died in 1994. I still have a lot of her stuff, boxes of it. I inherited enough notes on her craft, modern dance, choreography, many pictures, etc. to write a book, as well as a few cards she gave me over the years, almost ten we were together. The way I feel about it, any woman who comes into my life would have to realize that what went before is DEAD and cannot ever be revived. Of course the memories will never completely fade away and what may be different in my case is that since the relationship between us was on the whole such a positive one, it can only help make the next one that much better. I am not accustomed to thinking that the best is behind me, but since I have already had better than most I am looking for even better.

I suspect that any new relationship would have a far different character than what went before for either of us, me and a new woman. I am not interested in meeting a woman without a past. It's obvious that anyone who has really lived as long as I have has a past. If not, I'd wonder about them, whether they will ever have a life, with or without me. I doubt that I would ever give any of my late wife's stuff up. More likely I would give it to my daughters unless I do something with it, like actually working through it all and publishing a book. It would be quite a book a wonderful legacy.

LOL, I even have stuff from her two previous marriages. None of this stuff bothers me in the slightest, but I am not the jealous type. Jealousy is for the immature and the insecure. I am neither.

Some may recall the French movie A Man and a Woman. The woman had been married to a stunt car driver who had been killed. The new man made the comment that he always wondered whether he would ever be able to live up to the love she had for her late husband. I assume that the woman who makes her appearance in my life will know that it doesn't matter, that she will be able to be all women to me and I all men to her. I hope there's another woman out there who knows me as well as my late wife did and whom I can know as well as I knew her.

The Polar Bear

Virtue is its Own Punishment

Originally appeared on AOL, March 7, 1998

Edited, Thursday, February 3, 2000

I like that one and it's so often true; the most virtuous are often punished the most and the least virtuous prosper. It's an old question asked as long ago by none other King David who asked, "why do the wicked prosper?" But that wasn't the motivation for this post.

I was interested in this "sex kitten before marriage business" that so many men seem to complain about. What if the person they were married to was someone they hadn't lured into marrying them or they him? What if an entirely different dynamic were in place instead? What if they had really met someone for whom the usual boundaries of person, space and time expressed in every conceivable way from a look to a touch to a kiss to the words "I love you" just didn't exist? What if there was never really any doubt at all whether their spouses loved each other? What if they knew their spouses loved them right from the start, without any hesitation? What if this knowing just got better until they could just sit together side by side holding hands, knowing with every passing silent moment that they were eternally and always to love and be loved by each other?

This is what it was like for me to be married. I still remember that deep quiet emotional calm that seemed to build under me from the first moment I'd realized I'd finally done it, actually gotten married. It was such a surprise since everyone had told me that I had nothing but misery to look forward to once I said "I do". There was never the slightest intention to wander. I could acknowledge that other women might be attractive, sure. But in my heart I always knew to whom I would always be going home to. And the sex? If anything it just got better. We both experienced such intensities that there were frequent almost out of body experiences, lapses of momentary immortality. Of course we were wide open to each other and so everything that was possible seemed attainable.

Some have asked me whether I will ever really feel that anyone else can fill the void left by her passing. It's been almost six years now and I have been with no one since. Why bother with second rate sex? I did meet someone before meeting my wife, while I was in college, who I believe could have been my mate: we had that same instantaneous recognition of each other and so I do expect that it can and will happen again. Maybe.

We are not alone here much as we often feel frustrated about our current situations. But the materialist scientific viewpoint that has sold us the cheapening lie that we are nothing but animals evolved through the accidents of nature over eons of time that has done much to devalue humanity in its own eyes, along with much else in the modern world, is doing a pretty good job of spreading misery. Misery loves company. I will have none of it! I will wait, if necessary until it is too late and I must prepare for transit into the next life, which shall surely come to us all anyway.

Love and death? I chafed at the connection so often. But life is very very strange, stranger than most have any idea of, stranger than the limitations of fiction.

My website is now up. There will be more of an opportunity for a wider exposure. More will be known about me. I will be asking if anyone recognizes me in the same way that I was recognized at least twice before.

Even my twelve year old daughter has recognized that there is much domestic strife even here in this tiny village where we live. Two winters ago, the father of one of her classmates blew his brains out with his gun in the living room in the middle of the night. The little girl has never been the same my daughter says. It was such a shock. She said that her parents had been arguing for as long as she could remember. My daughter wanted to know why there was so much unhappiness among husbands and wives. My answer was quite simple, "they're just with the wrong people".

The Polar Bear