Still learning

Robin and I had an unspoken pact. There were some issues we didn't deal, and others that we did. It's not that we didn't know what our personal issues were. We'd talked around them occasionally over the years. Since we had similar issues we understood where one another was coming from. I'm sure it's one of the things that strengthened our bond, knowing that we understood each other on a deeper level.

I knew she had some private journals. Since I did the laundry I'd occasionally see one in her sock drawer and respectfully ignore it. I didn't realize that she had written in five or six of them until after she died. Weeks afterward I had sought them throughout the house. Where had those notebooks disappeared to? And then I found them. Stacked neatly inside the nightstand on her side of the bed. Somehow, at the time when she could still make it up the stairs, she had gathered them together and placed them in a spot where I couldn't help but eventually find them.

It was quite a gift to sense that she'd left them for me. Even weeks after she died, reading them brought back that feeling of a bond between us. The greatest writing had been when she attended massage school. Looking back I see that as her greatest triumph. Although she had issues with touch she chose a career path that would put her in the thick of it. Her writings were rife with the issues that massage brought up in her. As a student she gave and received massage every day for six months. Somehow I think she knew what she was facing by enrolling in the program. Eventually it yielded opportunities for growth that she couldn't have gotten any other way.

So here I am, fourteen months after she died. She used to like to sit out in the backyard and look at the stars, moon and sky. In mid-summer she'd lay on the concrete driveway which still exuded warmth absorbed from the daytime sun. Tonight's a little chilly (50 degrees) but sitting out here feels comfortable in so many ways. It feels a little closer to her spirit I guess.

I've been looking at the brilliant moon and thinking about a relationship I've been in for about seven months now. I don't write about it often because, well, it's private. I knew when I started dating that it seemed early, but it also seemed to be what I needed at the time. I'm sure that there are many reasons why I wanted to begin. Looking back now it seems clear that one reason was that I needed to face some of my own issues. Issues with relationships, so they weren't things that I could face on my own. Somehow, like Robin, my soul was finding a way to bring the issues to the fore.

Well, true to what wife tales would tell you, I found myself in a relationship with issues very similar to those that had existed in my relationship with Robin. Somehow our actions often lead us down the same paths again and again. Even Robin and I had talked about how some people can go from one relationship to another finding the same issues with their mates over and over again - never realizing that they are the ones carting the issues from one relationship to another. Always finding new partners who respond to those particular issues.

Although I can be slow on the uptake, the issues in my new relationship kept coming back and eventually I responded differently to them. Instead of feeling a need to be a continually supportive even when someone is acting out their isses I found myself fighting that role (a role which had come so easily to me in the past). Hey, I've got issues, the person I'm dating has issues - but they are our own issues which we've been holding onto for years. The only person who has a chance of finding resolution to them is the person who owns them. So now I'm learning how to confront issues when they arise, rather than support them.

I talked to a dear friend last night about how things have evolved over the past seven months. I talked about how I found myself rejecting the "role" that I had played for years, as if I had actively chosen to be different now. My friend made the observation that maybe my actions weren't so much by choice. She noted that possibly the experience of losing Robin had simply changed me so profoundly that the old "Greg" no longer existed. That I'd lost so much of myself when Robin died that I just couldn't be that person anymore. The statement had a ring of truth to it, because there had been situations in which I'd tried act in my old ways but it no longer felt true to me.

Somehow I think Robin would be tickled to see that I'm still here and that apparently I'm still learning.