A Hard Lesson Learned
I have learned the hard way that until you kiss the cold dead gray lips of the love-of-your-life after witnessing their last breath in your arms, and then walk away from their body for the very last time, you can not understand real loss.
Before my husband Gus died, we had nearly all of our possessions stolen. But we still had our lives, and we still had each other, so we got over it. Those things we lost were just things after all.
I know I am blessed to have had Gus' amazing unconditional love and I still feel like the world's luckiest woman because he loved me. Even though he has been gone over two years now, I can still feel his love. I know that's much more than some people will ever have and I am grateful for it each and every day.
I also now know real loss, and that's why I don't sweat the small stuff anymore. Now I know first hand that the best things in life are not things, and compared to losing Gus, everything else is small stuff.
I have also learned that perspective is everything; everything is subject to interpretation and there is no substitute for experience. All priceless lessons I may never have learned without suffering the endless heartache of loss that I endure every day.
I think about Gus every day. Everyday I'm missing him, loving him still and ultimately grateful for the blessings and the lessons I received from living with him and being loved by him and being there to witness his passing.
I learned from loving him that I have a limitless heart wrenching capacity for love inside of me. I learned that it's far better to have loved him and to suffer his loss than to have lived my life without ever feeling his love and loving him back.
I'll never get over losing Gus; in fact I don't want to. I don't ever want to get over his loss because to me that would be diminishing his memory somehow. I know I can't replace him, and I won't even try to. He set the bar way too high for that. I'm sure there is always the chance that some other amazing gorgeous man might still come along who will love and adore me as much or maybe even more(if that's possible)than Gus did, but I'm honestly not expecting that.
Sometimes I worry that having had such a great love already, means the odds are against me ever finding true love again in this life. I am sure Gus and I knew each other in other lives, there is no doubt in my mind about that. The very first time we ever met in this life, we both knew instantly that we had known each other before.
We looked into each others eyes and everything else fell away. The way that he looked at me then shall forever linger in my memory. It was a look that will flash before my inner eyes for incarnations to come, a look of recognition and confusion that perfectly reflected my own. A look that I suspect will be the last thing I see in the cinema of my mind before I die.
It was as if at that moment there was no one else alive in the whole world except him and me. His twinkling eyes barely concealed an intense passion and sexuality that smoldered just beneath his surface that I could feel as surely as I feel the chair that I sit in now.
Sometimes I cry thinking I might somehow forget that look, or the way he looked at me with total love and adoration each and every day after we got together. I hope I never do forget those beautiful blue eyes of his, or the power they had over me. God how I miss that man so much! It still hurts every day to be without him. It's a huge fist clenching my heart and my throat. It's a very real physical pain that still shuts me down sometimes and crying is all I can do.
I'll never get over losing Gus but I'm getting on with it, incorporating his loss into my daily life and into my future.