Our idyllic vacation is nearing its end. I’m turbid with ambiguity knowing that more time has passed than is left. While the beauty and excitement I’ve eagerly anticipated for months is still in my face, I hear home beckoning with its soft coo of routine and security and the confidence of “you’ve got this.” I want to go back and at the same time I want to stay.
It hasn’t helped that Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” found its way into my travel bag. I didn’t realize what this book was about when I packed it, I just knew I wanted to read her work. Almost four hours on the plane was plenty of time to be sucked into the vortex of her self-study on grief after the sudden death of her husband and constant companion of nearly 40 years.
She speaks of all the moments she dismissed, innocently distracted by the busy routine of daily life. She punished herself for not listening more intently, for not taking conversations more seriously, for brushing off the whispered foreshadowing that only hindsight can scream.
I can be an intense vacationer. I count the days as they tick by. I know what I came for and I want as much of it as I can possibly pack in. I don’t like to rest. I don’t like the business of being inside when my business here is outside. I know I’m only in this place for a limited time, that I need to absorb as much of the magic my temporary surroundings have to offer, in this case sea and sand and sunshine, before they are not accessible to me anymore. I’m compelled to steep in my vacation circus, walking the tightrope of too much and not enough.
He and I have been talking about dependence, the unspoken turning point in our relationship when we both realized he had me, that he is, hands down, the person I most want to spend my time with. And it took the ache of absence for me to see it. I remember the moment vividly. He had been talking in what I considered to be veiled terms about leaving our visit with friends a night ahead of me. I dismissed the comments as they were couched in the guise of allowing me more time on my own and I knew that wasn’t what I wanted. When he kissed me goodbye in front of everyone and walked out the door I was devastated. “What do you mean,” I wanted to scream. “You can’t leave without me.” But instead I kept the peace. Would it send my friends the wrong message about my feelings for them if I objected? What would it say about this independent woman’s dependence on her man?
It was a long night alone in a strange bed when it dawned on me: I was already in deep and I wouldn’t be floating to the surface again.
Always the scout, Didion now prods me to look ahead into an imagined future, one where he abruptly leaves me, this time against his will, in the care of loving friends who don’t have a prayer of consoling me. Will I sit in a dark room again wondering why I didn’t take him seriously when he tried to warn me?
And so I’m cursing Joan Didion a little, for so blatantly planting in my head the seeds of consequence of a true and meaningful love. When we love someone to the depths of emotional dependence, we have no choice but to suffer unimaginable grief when that person is gone.
Love is such a brutal and beautiful surrender. We think we know exactly where we are in its waters. We won’t swim out too far, we’re stronger than its current, we can always make it back to shore. We believe we can walk that tightrope of just enough to feel romantically happy, yet not so much to be hurt measurably and irrevocably if it all suddenly disappears.
Maybe we don’t miss something before we leave it, maybe it’s more about anticipating how we’ll feel when it’s gone and trying to ward off grief. The impulse is to go overboard, to try to pay rapt attention, to not waste a minute, to savor every moment, but we’ll fail miserably. The best we can do is strive to be attuned and recognize that when we’re in this deep there is no escaping grief. That’s not how love works.
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