being together | Bertram's Blog

Living Each Day We Are Given

December 5, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I’m noticing a change in my attitude lately — more cynical perhaps, and at the same time more optimistic about the future. This change showed itself to me in my reaction to a news story that is going around about a couple who holds the record for the longest marriage — 86 years. The story purported to tell the secrets of how they stayed together for so long, and my first thought was, “Because one of them didn’t die.” No matter how much they love each other, no matter how well they get along, if one of them had died, that would have been the end of their being together.

Immediately following my cynical thought was a moment of horror at the idea of being stuck in the same sort of life for all those years. She married very young, so what did she know of life (or herself) before making her vows? And she’ll never have a chance of exploring what she could have been on her own. The universal reaction to the story seemed to be “Oh, how sweet,” so the horror I felt must not reflect their situation but my own changing attitude.

My soul mate and I always thought we would die together since our bond was so strong, and yet, here I am and he is not. The pain of our separation was almost more than I could bear at times, and in fact, sometimes the only way I could get through another minute of continued life was to scream my pain into the wind.

Now, as I pass through to the other side of grief, continuing to process all the various emotions, fears, regrets, guilts, I sense that a new life awaits me, a life of possibilities, maybe even adventure. I don’t know what form this life will take, whether it will entail geographical travels or spiritual travels, new activities or new perspectives, broadening my horizons or only broadening my mind. But a new life is surely coming, and sometimes my heart leaps ahead of me at the thought of such freedom.

I’m not yet at that place of freedom. I still have many concerns to deal with first. Since I am looking after my 96-year-old father, that is my prime concern, but there are also personal concerns such as my continued awareness of my mate’s death. I know he would be the first to applaud my coming adventures — he felt bad that the constraints of his illness and the life we were forced to live destroyed my spontaneity, but the truth is, he gave me the courage to be spontaneous in the first place. And now I’ll have to find the courage to be spontaneous on my own.

It’s a difficult line to walk — being glad of a chance at a different sort of life while at the same time not being glad of the death that will allow such a life, being glad of one more day of life while being aware that such a day was denied him. But I will find a way to handle it as I have handled every step of this grief journey.

Maybe the secret isn’t how to stay together, but how we live each day we are given, whether with someone or alone.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the conspiracy novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+

Posted in culture, life, relationships. Tags: being together, staying together, surviving grief. 7 Comments »

What Grief Taught Me About Love

December 22, 2011 — Pat Bertram

It always amuses me when I see “biographies” of young celebrities. “Biography” connotes more than a simple depiction of the facts of a life. It should tell us the person’s early influences, their failures and successes, their growth through adversity and grace during prosperity, and most of all, how they ended up where they ended up. What does any of that have to do with an eighteen-, twenty-, or even thirty-year old celebrity? Sure we can see what their childhood influences are, but how do those early years affect their later ones? How do they carry themselves throughout a lifetime of success and failure? What did they learn? (Quite frankly, what is there to say about a person who acheives success at an early age and who maintains that success? So they struggled for a few years. So what? Many people struggle a lifetime and achieve nothing but old age.)

In fiction, the starting point of the story is when the character first encounters a major change that ruptures the status quo of his or her life, and it ends when s/he has established a new normal, a new status quo. In non-fiction, biographies especially, you expect the sweep of years, not merely a fraction of the life. (But then, who am I to say that biographies are non-fiction.)

When a person dies, you can begin to see the sweep of his life. It exists entire and whole in itself, without possibility of change. It is only then that you can make sense of that life, at least as it pertains to you. (I’m not sure we can ever truly make sense of another’s life, since so much of one’s life is internal and hidden from view.) So it is with me and my life mate/soul mate. I can see more clearly what we were to each other and why I still grieve his death.

What we had didn’t feel like love. After a few brief years of hope and happiness, our love was sublimated by the constraints of his growing ill health. It seemed that our cosmic love devolved into the prosaic things of life: cooking meals, doing errands, struggling to keep our retail business alive. And then it devolved further into simply surviving. Getting through the days as best as we could. We always knew we had a deep connection, though we never understood it and at times we both railed against it in our struggle to maintain our own identities, but we took that connection for granted. And what is that connection if not love?

It’s only when the story is ended that you can see the truth of it. And the truth is that love is not what you feel, but what you do. Love is being together, sharing good times and bad. It’s about not being afraid to explore who you are and what you will become. It’s about being together however you can for however long you can.

My wish for you, during this season of giving, is that you find enough love to last a lifetime.