@@CHAP@@ LIKE AN IRON BELL
Dear Sugar,
My twenty-year marriage fell apart. Whose fault? Mine? My wife’s? Society’s? I don’t know. We were too immature to get married back in the eighties, and we both worked hard to avoid dealing with the unhappiness that was hanging over us.
But that’s in the past. I’ve had a few relationships in the three years since the split. One casual, one serious, and one current. There was no issue with the casual one: I was up-front about not wanting to settle down so soon. The second one started out casual, and I actually broke it off when she got serious, but I couldn’t stay away and promised to consider long-term plans with her. I also told her I loved her after a year of avoiding that word, the definition of which I don’t really understand. I balked when it came time to piss or get off the pot and I lost both a lover and a friend in her.
Now I’ve again met a woman with whom I click very nicely. We have been dating and being intimate for about four months. She’s going through a bitter divorce and wasn’t looking for a commitment. That sounded perfect, but in reality neither of us was interested in dating more than one person, so here we are in an exclusive relationship.
She sounds like she’s falling in love with me, though she won’t say the word. I am avoiding that word as well, but clearly we’re both thinking it. I’m afraid of saying it out loud, as my experience shows that word “love” comes loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.
My question to you is, when is it right to take that big step and say I love you? And what is this “love” thing all about?
Best, Johnny
Dear Johnny,
The last word my mother ever said to me was “love.” She was so sick and weak and out of her head she couldn’t muster the “I” or the “you,” but it didn’t matter. That puny word has the power to stand on its own.
I wasn’t with my mom when she died. No one was. She died alone in a hospital room, and for so many years it felt like three-quarters of my insides were frozen solid because of that. I ran it over and over in my mind, the series of events and choices that kept me from being beside my mom in her last hours, but thinking about it didn’t do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn’t have a bottom.
I would never be with my mother when she died. She would never be alive again. The last thing that happened between us would always be the last thing. There would be the way I bent to kiss her and the way she said, “Please, no,” when I got close because she couldn’t any longer bear the physical pain of people touching her. There would be the way that I explained I’d return in the morning and the way she just barely nodded in response. There would be the way I got my coat and said, “I love you,” and the way she was silent until I was almost out the door and she called, “love.” And there would be the way that she was still lying in that bed when I returned the next morning, but dead.
My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.
I suppose you think this has nothing to do with your question, Johnny, but it has everything to do with my answer. It has everything to do with every answer I have ever given to anyone. It’s Sugar’s genesis story. And it’s the thing my mind kept swirling back to over these five weeks since you wrote to me and said you didn’t know the definition of “love.”