‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
-Tennyson
The above quoted poem is often misattributed to Shakespeare about a romantic loss. It was actually Tennyson writing about a friend who has passed away who he wrote poetry together. Still, the association of loving and losing is one that many of us have struggled with.
Recently I went through an exercise I had planned for years. Back in the days of the divorce, about 9 years ago as I was going through cancer, when I was repainting walls and getting rid of many things to make the house feel new, it was tempting to get rid of many many things and Eliza Hamilton style perhaps burn them. But I did not instead painfully and slowly I put years of notes and pictures and memories into a big plastic bin. I have no memories of my father in childhood since I didn't meet him and he didn't know I existed until I was 15. I've heard many times since then and in adulthood variations in their stories about each other, memory getting painted by the present, viewed through shifting lens of theirs and my life. So I decided then to leave it all to Kiana to look through some day, I didn't know when.
We'd talked about it for a few months but finally last weekend, I took down a box that hadn't been touched in almost a decade. I am not the type that holds onto things if they 'bring you joy.' I am the kind of guy that if things don't have regular functional use then well it's time to discard them. That box, or at least the thought of it, did neither. I opened it and started the enterprise with her, introducing to her what I had always called the dream book. It was a list of 'identities to be, things to do, and places to go' that had been the back of our wedding program, an ambitious list. I'd actually gone through just that the night before with the women I love in the modern age prepping for it with the young lady. Perhaps that had helped thaw the ice but going through it with her was just sweet, not bitter sweet (what I had expected) as I recollected a 10 year marriage and a 14 year relationship with trips around the world and home memories. Each accomplishment was captured in a page or two. The last two pages I had actually made on my own, somewhat uncompleted with no captions like the rest and made them post break up, things we'd done along the brain cancer path but never scrapped book.
After that exercise I let Kiana have free rein. She asked about this and that and there were dozens (hundreds?) of notes in there since we had dated back in high school in the age before text messaging and had sustained a long distance relationship where we wrote actual mail not just email. She had questions about this content and that content but eventually said okay that's just way too much to read. She looked through some of the pictures. I told her she was free to keep everything and that almost certainly I would be throwing the rest away. She kept some pictures, interestingly enough some glamour shots and a very unflattering picture of her mother and something similar for me (I never did glamour shots). She's been painting and drawing those since. Unless I missed it, she didn't keep any pictures of us two together, something that I suppose makes sense since her memories of us are as individuals not as a unit.
She spent a few hours on it over a couple of days and when she declared she was done, I thought it was too fast too soon! I gave it a few moments worth of thought that maybe I should hold onto it longer, let her do this again in a few years when she was more mature and could appreciate the love she was born out of. I did not. I started slowly emptying out the bin and the things she had spread out into a garbage bag. I did not read a single thing; I'd been there already. There were things that I knew what the content was; there were others that it was tempting to remember the details but I passed. I looked through a fair share of the pictures, without exception each of them brought a smile. I don't know whether or not absence makes the heart grow fonder but time had done some healing because, for me at least, all I remembered were happy moments, moments of connections, dreams coming true. The one thing I had decided I was keeping irregardless was the dream book. I was not committed to but not closed to the possibility of keeping anything else. Still as I went through the pile it was happy memories and moments but time to discard them, a pile at a time, sometimes one at a time. There was exactly one thing that I was hesitant about. Kiana's mother is from Hawaii and loved the beach so I had proposed on a beach, with a two sided shell that I had lined with blue velvet and pretended to find. Appropriately enough, on the way to the shell, she found a two sided shell for the first time in her life. Only minutes later I would pretend to do the same and would kneel to pick it up and then ask the question of a lifetime. Somehow I'd kept that shell, just remembering the container of the promise, and for several solid moments I almost kept it but ultimately remembered that the ring itself I didn't know nor wish to know what had happened to it so holding onto its container was silly even if appropriately sentimental.
I did then and I do now, love Kiana's mother and will do so till the day of my death. I promised that and the container of that promise, my heart, is still intact. I've told Kiana that in the middle of some of the silly fights with her mother. I've told her that in my post divorce navigation as she had her first significant other, on the day of my second wedding, on the day she went through those. There isn't a day where her mother would need actually help at two PM or AM for anything and I wouldn't do my best to show up. Shy of it being in the early days when she was leaving with me a few weeks post brain surgery while I actually had staples still in my head and divorced me before even all the follow up at Duke was done or even less than a year after my first seizure, I didn't refer to her as my exwife. I still do not; her label in my phone and in conversation references is Kiana's mother. I suppose I hold the marriage vows, whether traditional or self written or some modern variation to be a lifetime one with our inability to make it last as intended till death as the biggest failure of my life. It is one of the biggest reasons for the George Clooney years.
I agree with Tennyson that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Still despite what was a heart breaking event, despite years of court drama and life silliness, I choose to look back and forward at it as that love, if it truly is loved is always a win. People have different definitions of love. I've never liked at weddings or birthdays or when people describe someone they love and talk about how they love that person and then only describe what that person does for them or helps them with. That, perhaps is love, but isn't it the shallowest version where you love someone only for what they did for you, doesn't it make love merely transactional? I am far more inspired when someone talks about someone they love and the purity of obligation that comes to be with them and for them, to where it is a cycle that needs to feed each other but also serve outside there. Anyway, that's enough diatribe.
I hope to never lose anyone I love again to choice. Being part of the cancer world and life itself, well I lost people I love to death itself too often. But I hope everyone I say I love you to, something I rarely say, is someone we maintain and grow what got us to say it to each other forever. But even if I love and lose, I choose to maintain that love when you actually have it, no matter what occurs, is always, always a win.
