Valentine’s Day, 2012. Late. Hung up with a project, errands, arrangements for this or that. Don’t’ remember. Throw on coat. Check myself in the mirror. Head downtown. Make wrong turn after wrong turn. Town still new to me. Check watch. Feel my arms tighten. Call Tony. His voice calm, clear navigates me toward the restaurant. Greets me at the door. Ushers me to our booth. In a small, quiet, elegant restaurant. Chosen for this special day.
We order. I am edgy, angry. Tony keeps his responses slow. Checks his reactions to my emotional state. Breathes. But I escalate. Negative thoughts cascading. Unmasking resentment over moving here. Away from family, friends, beloved church. Toward better schools, more time with Tony and for my dreams. Plans now hidden under ongoing business issues and beginnings of one son’s mystery illness. Stare down at plate. Wish I could stop. Delight in our time together. Pause. Close my eyes. Open to tears falling. Onto beautiful salmon.
In life without Tony, I want so very much to remember romantic times full of movie moments. But often remember instead truthful ones. Times showing me not as a good wife. But as a human one. Sobbing into salmon in public on Valentine’s Day. A memory now making me smile, laugh, shake my head. Love’s beauty held not in a commercially dictated day depicting love as an experience. But as a real moment of true love lived in action as an ongoing verb.
I cried that day because I felt emotionally safe to do so. Tony knew how to hold emotionally uncomfortable spaces. The ones we want to avoid. Gloss over with fancy greeting cards, ribbons, roses, and lingerie. Because holding emotionally uncomfortable spaces is a true act of shared love. Part of providing emotional containment for one another. Bearing the other’s burdens, baggage, built-up unmet needs. Holding one another’s pain.
Few people ask a widow for relationship advice. An intense irony of the experience. But today in unsolicited commentary I embrace the most difficult verb in our collective experience—to love. Lift up those moments when all seems lost, life makes no sense, future appears fuzzy. And in the midst of it all the person who shares the work of love with you or me says in action or word, “I am here. I am not going anywhere. We will figure this out. Whatever this is. We will figure this out, together.”
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.
Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez 
Thank you, Jennifer, for your beautiful words.
Thank you so much for your insights and for being so real.
Beautiful, truthful words on what it means to love. People should ask widows for advice on relationships. We have had them and have them, and we know the pain of losing them.
Still love it.