Vol. 1, Post #27 Endless Love

This is a post about grief. My ongoing sex tips for girls* (*girls who are holding on to mid-life by a thread). A modern dating odyssey for Young Olds, AKA, people with readers.

“Ben died.”

I was sitting with my friend at dinner and while I knew Ben was terminally ill, I was still surprised by the news.

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“His wife posted on his ‘care blog’ that he was in hospice and was being kept comfortable. It just went from there.”

We sat in silence for a minute. I felt my eyes welling with tears, another surprise. I had never met Ben in person.

We spoke about the obituary, the funeral. My friend was speaking quietly, with a kind of detached numbness that I recognized as sadness mixed with a little bit of anger. Hers was a specific kind of grief.

Ben was her boyfriend for nearly a decade. When they met, he was married, unhappily but legally committed to someone else. Over the course of their years together, they did all the regular partnered stuff that people do, and by that, I mean, they went away together and stayed home together. They did all the regular partnered stuff that people do when they are having an affair, and by that, I mean they squabbled about when he was leaving his wife and what were my friend’s expectations, and how the middle ground seemed to evade them no matter what was discussed or promised.

Even though they had broken up, my friend was vaguely in touch with Ben and was able to see him before he went into hospice. That visit, like much of their relationship, did not go particularly smoothly. I listened to her tell me more and I watched her face, her eyes, which remained dry.

“Do you want to do anything? Something to honor Ben and maybe something to recognize your loss?” I asked her. I was now making a real effort to tamp down my tears. This was ridiculous…or was it?

“Like what?” she asked. “Not a lot of people knew about Ben and me.”

“I know, and that’s why I’m asking. Do you want to gather a few people and say Kaddish (the Hebrew prayer for mourning) and maybe just recognize your loss? I think this is something to not overlook. You knew him a long time,” I said, knowing that if she turned me down, I’d drop the subject.

She was quiet for a second. “Yes. Yes, I think I’d like that.”

Later that night, I had the cry I was holding back in the restaurant. I had, yes, been sad for my friend and as part of that sadness, registered the not quite deer-in-the-headlights look on her face, her grim acceptance of a shitty situation that now ends with zero closure, the perfect shitty word for what happens as part of grief.

While most of us know that closure is something we give ourselves, it’s nevertheless a big plate of Bullshit with a side helping of Indignation and a bottomless brunch dessert buffet of What Ifs.

If you’ve composed that letter or email to your ex, your parents, your sibling, your boss or anyone else in your life who made an impact on you before you had a deeply divergent parting of ways, you know that you’re often best served by writing it and then just saving it to drafts or (better yet) tossing it or burning it.

But when someone is gone; when the ability to connect on any level is removed as an option, it’s a different kind of closure. And that’s why I was crying at home alone that night.

There was a time a few years ago when my former partner (not legally separated from his ex but certainly living apart) was going through a health scare. As we resided in different cities, I was concerned and not happy to be at a distance. At one point, I said I wanted to go to a doctor’s appointment with him and was frustrated by all the reasons I could not, including optics. He was not yet divorced. While I understood, this thought ran through my head and festered: What if he was really sick? What if something went very wrong and he was hospitalized? And for that matter (and I knew this was ridiculous but maybe not), there was also this: my partner was Catholic from a practicing family, one of the reasons he and his estranged wife were not divorced. Could I be looking at a church funeral in my future (the Jewess in me immediately poo-poo-poo’d this thought) whereas I wouldn’t be invited, OR, would be relegated to the back row, unwanted?

My fears weren’t entirely unfounded. I’ve referenced an online women’s group of which I’m a member — the one that my pal Michael loves to shout out “Is this a ‘Feminists Over 40’ story?” whenever I bring up a situation that someone in the group has posted or queried about, and, right on schedule, about the same time that my ex had a health scare, someone in the group posted something about her sorrow in that her “Ben” had died and as “The Other Woman,” she was mourning alone, not sure if she should go to the funeral, to say nothing about how she also assumed that if she did attend, no one knew she existed, which also hurt ( and if she were to go, she imagined polite conversation like, “How did you know X?” and what do you say to that?).

When that member of my online FO40 group posted about her pain, mourning her lover alone, I very carefully watched the comments and advice roll in. I was hoping that no one would take this woman to task for the affair. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of people who would be rightly upset or outraged at the idea of a deceased spouse’s lover attending a funeral. Who could blame them? Beyond their own feelings, there are of course children’s emotions to consider, potentially the wrath of friends or colleagues who might offer unkind judgement, etc. And at the same time — and tell me if you concur or disagree, Dear Readers — as Young Olds, we no doubt know people who stay married or coupled up for reasons beyond passionate commitment to our partners. For that matter, as Young Olds, we know (at least I do) people who have affairs with their spouse’s tacit blessing, or at least, with more than a grain of don’t ask, don’t tell.

In the end, my online FO40 group was kind and supportive of this sister’s grief, even though she was The Other Woman (only one or two people pointed out to this woman’s presence might be disruptive, also true, but I appreciated that no one piled on her). I deeply dislike Victorian thinking regarding affairs. It serves no one and while lying and sneaking around are abhorrent, we are, after all, only people and people make mistakes. Lots of mistakes.

Back to my friend and our dinner last week. Since I know a little bit about my friend’s long-time love affair with Ben, I also know that one of her very close friends — perhaps her bestie — was extremely critical of the affair, judgmental, etc., most likely because she saw in my friend’s situation something that she feared in her own marriage. And it’s not that I don’t understand that — I do — but at this point, does it matter?

Does it matter?

I don’t think so.

What matters is who is present to help us manage our grief, and, in this instance, my friend is basically alone. None of us know Ben’s wife or their family. Of course, I wish them peace. This is not about them. I can separate my thinking about my friend and her loss from the life that Ben lived without her, the way you separate an egg yolk from the white. I’ve looked at life from both sides now. And it has nothing to do with having an affair, because I’ve not been in her position. But I have loved and lost and been consumed, nearly eaten alive, by grief.

When I was a kid, I think I had an almost preposterous notion of romantic love, particularly forbidden love. Some of that was most certainly informed by two of my favorite books from my teenage years, both by Scott Spencer, Endless Love and Waking The Dead*.

*Both became films, and neither film holds a candle to the books, to the degree that I’m not even including links to the movie trailers here for yuks. Endless Love is a tome about love and loss and regret that borders on surreal insanity and Waking The Dead is about love and dedication to the life you believe you are meant to lead, even when it takes you away from what you crave the most.

However, when Endless Love came out in theaters (1981, versus when the novel was published in 1979), it not only featured nubile Brooke Shields but also the unstoppable eponymous theme song by Diana Ross and Lionel Ritchie. People lost their minds. My MOTHER took me to see it, as I was 13 and it had an R rating (Related/unrelated: in 1979, when we were 11, my friend Wendy and I were taken to see another R-rated emotional roller coaster, The Rose, by Wendy’s cooler-than-cool grandmother. We cried buckets — I still cry every time I hear “Stay With Me” sung by Bette Midler in the film’s crescendo end scene, although Chris Cornell’s version also makes me weep, and the original, by Lorraine Ellison, is magnificent, too. What can I say? I love a sad song, I like a good cry, and in this instance, “Stay With Me” was written by our pal Bobby’s dad as bonus! But I digress.).

When I saw Endless Love in the theater, I sure did sob like everyone else, but I was shocked at what they did to the storyline. Yes, it had the same premise, but the story was turned into some young-love-gone-wrong Hollywood schmutz and I was fairly outraged after we left the movie, explaining to my mother that “no one got the book right!” My mother was most likely bemused but didn’t really care; Brooke Shields was a young star and she and I shared the same bushy eyebrows, something my mother loved to brag about (oy).

What the movie “missed” wasn’t young love or lust. There was plenty of that. No, what the film never captured that poured out on the pages of the book was the deep, deep sense of loss that almost each of the characters experienced in different ways, based on where they were in their lives. Yes, there were star-crossed teen lovers, but there were just as many adults — probably the same age as we are now! — who were having affairs, chasing inappropriate lovers, getting divorced, seeing spouses die, looking back in anger or rage at missed opportunities, the whole shebang. The book was, in fact, not about the tender beating hearts of a boy and a girl in love but the pounding, wailing heart like that of a banshee, screaming for what was once possessed and now lost. Screaming out loud with a soundtrack of police sirens and family throw downs and cinematic drama, and screaming in poisonous solitude, alone in a house, feeling like the last person alive in a cold, brutal, loveless world.

I was deeply relieved, when doing some background Googling for this post, that The New York Times, in 2008, wrote a mini-piece on Scott Spencer’s reaction to the various book covers that Endless Love has carried over the years, I always hated it when a paperback book was reissued with a movie poster on its cover and I think the current edition cover of Endless Love perfectly summarizes the feeling I took away from the book when I first read it, and every time I returned to read again. That’s my book, in my hand, at the top of this post, although I owned the other versions as well. This cover works. A neat and tidy house. Nothing looking out of place. And a woman with her head on the table, beyond reach in grief.

Grief is part of the cycle of love. Grief is something I wish we all honored more in our lives. To that end, I’ve always loved this poem, written by the author in tribute to her younger brother who died of AIDS. Marie is a fierce poet, and a friend from years back.

What The Living Do, by Marie Howe, from the great book of poetry of the same name.

For my friend and for Ben.