I haven’t felt at all compelled to write lately, but I feel like I need to check in.
I’m in Arizona, suddenly, because my Grandpa Sam’s wife, Ellie, passed away this morning. She was one of the brightest spirits I ever knew. Ellie refused to be anything she was expected to be. She had strong opinions and she wasn’t afraid to share them. When she sat next to me at family events, she’d occasionally turn to me with a dirty quip about the conversation at the dinner. Up until the past few months, when she became ill, Ellie always had a crystal clear read on any situation. She never had a “senior moment.” She knew what everyone in the room was doing, what they were thinking, how they were feeling, and what was likely to happen next. Nothing got past that woman, and she was never afraid to weigh in. I always hoped I could be that fearless when I grew old.
Encompassing the outspokenness, though, was a woman full of love and kindness. A woman who was always on my side, an unerring support system. She loved her children and her grandchildren dearly, and she died peacefully, surrounded by a family she created and nurtured.
I want to write a more thorough account of her life and its impact on me at a later point. Right now I still feel very numb. I think I’m still in shock. I loved and respected Ellie deeply, and I know the full force of the loss of her hasn’t hit me yet.
It was a strange day. I got home late last night from a whirlwind vacation with two of my best friends (I’ll write about this later). My mom called to say Ellie wasn’t doing well and they weren’t sure if she’d live through the night. There was nothing I could do at that point, so I went to bed.
The same night, my ex-boyfriend texted to say he was in Seattle for some meetings and he’d love to meet up. He is the last real boyfriend I had, and his unceremonious dumping of me four years ago kicked off the series of events that would result in every reason I cherish my life today. There was a lot of hard work and pain during the intervening years, though, and I like to think I’m approaching the point in my life where I am no longer making relationship decisions using the trauma of that breakup as a basis. (This is probably not true.) But I no longer have hard feelings toward him, and we’ve grown close as friends in the past couple of years, so I decided to meet him for lunch. It was the first time I’d seen him in nearly four years.
He was standing outside the restaurant, wearing a business suit, chatting animatedly on his cell phone while smoking a Parliament. I would recognize this man anywhere. Nothing has changed.
Half an hour into lunch, my sister called to tell me Ellie had passed. I needed to book a plane ticket, I needed to find someone to take Leo, and I still had two conference calls to be on that afternoon. So he came back to my apartment with me and helped me pack and clean. He had calls of his own to make, so I’m finishing up my packing, running around the apartment like a crazy lady, and Sean is in my living room, still wearing a full suit from his business meeting earlier in the day, following up on sales calls while smoking cigarettes and drinking Gatorade. We move around each other seamlessly. We predict where the other will be and what the other will need. The cats remember him. I can tell what type of call he’s on by the way his tone, his inflection, shifts. These tiny details about his salesman voice had just been sitting in my memory all these years, waiting to be accessed. It’s like no time has passed. It’s like no time has passed at all. It’s like he belongs in that living room. It’s like he has always been in that living room.
He runs me through a packing checklist. He stays calm and I do too.
He drives me to run some errands and drop off Leo, and then he drives me to the airport. We spend the time in the car talking, about his failed relationships and my own. About why. “You’re in your element right now,” he comments, referring to the professional success I’ve found in Seattle, since starting Evil Beet and leaving aerospace. “You would never have found this if you’d stayed with me. You never would have been happy.”
He’s right, of course.
“If we’d met when you were at this place in your life,” he says, “it might have been different. But now we’re both such different people.”
I laugh. Today, we’re both people terrified of commitment. We’re both people who have had our hearts broken after we trusted them with someone completely. We are both people unwilling to become truly intimate with anyone. We are both people who go through entire romantic relationships with one foot clear out the door. Neither of us was that type of person before we happened to each other.
We arrive at the airport. He carries my bag for me.
“I’m glad I got to help you today,” he says. And it doesn’t feel like my ex-boyfriend — the man I had every intention of marrying until he left, the man who turned my life upside down and shook it until it vomited — has reappeared in my life today after being gone for four years. It just feels like Sean is back, like Sean is taking care of me like Sean took care of me every day for years until we both made that impossible. It feels natural, and I don’t know why God set our paths to cross on this particular day, but I needed him there today. And I think he needed me there today too.
And he’ll go back home and we’ll both go on with our lives and neither of us is young enough to think that a second go-round at this relationship would actually produce better results. It wasn’t about that, really. It was never about rekindling an old flame, not for either of us. It was about remembering that an intimacy like that never fades. When two people spend years of their life operating as a single unit, the neural pathways they built around one another don’t decompose. Love like that doesn’t fade. The “in love” fades, but the love does not.
And so I guess that gives me some comfort in the loss of Ellie. She will never again appear in my living room. She will not help me pack and she will not drive me to the airport. She will not make phone calls. She will not watch her favorite reality TV shows and gossip with me about the characters. I will never again recognize her voice or her smile or her laugh as she sits next to me. But I will not lose the ability to do this. The person who is Ellie, everything about her that I recognized as unique, is stored at all levels of minutiae in my brain. She is in there and she’s not leaving any time soon. I would recognize her anywhere.
