February 29, 2024

Leap Day or Sadie Hawkin’s day. The latter being something from my adolescence when we had a school dance and the girls asked the boys. I can’t remember who I asked? Perhaps it was the guy I ended up with on the side of a cliff in Maui three decades later? I think that’s a safe guess he was my Mr. Wonderful that year.

And this day this 29th day of the month marks 139 days since I realized how fully I had drawn my lovely partner into the center of my unhealed wounds so he could suffer along with me. No wonder he confided uncertainty about a future with me. No wonder he carefully described his mixed emotions surrounding spending the rest of his life with me. But he wasn’t ready to pull the plug and so I held space for him. I held space for him in ways I was never allowed to rest in difficult and confusing emotions over a decade ago. And these one-hundred thirty-nine days have been the best of our near decade together and the worst of our decade together. There was never rage between us, never bickering, we didn’t fall back on passive-aggressive anger, resentment, complacency, or contempt. In October I consciously decided I would not leave. A flouncy leaving with ugly words hurled at him. I didn’t leave because the two things we recognized in October were how much we did love one another and how much we stood to lose if we couldn’t sort through a year’s worth of my shaky mental health and rolling around in old wounds. We recognized we would be losing our best friend. And we agreed that hurt the most.

I’m so very happy I did not deploy my rock solid amazing plan b. Because when he told me “I don’t know about us, I think you should leave” I pulled myself together and made decisions about what my life would look like without him. My “Plan B” file became my refuge when things were difficult between us or he was distant. It became my little. buoy in the storm, a collection of websites with places to live in other parts of the country; how-to’s for leaving the states and retiring overseas. But as fall turned into the darkest winter and despite a horrific Christmas we plowed through the darkest month into February when things began to ease for us. We never went to bed angry and we always fell asleep intertwined in one another’s arms, hands clasped. He never stopped calling me his “rock”.

A close friend almost died in January and when we visited him, we felt the palpable pain of his wife’s grief. We held onto one another because her pain could be one of us. Our friend is recovering but the lesson of losing one another lingers. One day 130 he apologized to me for ever doubting our future. “I don’t know what happened” I do my sweet man, I allowed my anxiety and trauma to pollute us. I allowed my inability to admit to you I was struggling poison the water. And when he said: “I can’t believe I did this to you.” I burst into a solelequey about how his October words moved me back into therapy and I’m finally facing and healing my “daddy wound”. How I’m learning to be vulnerable rather than guarded.

I haven’t confided how his October words forced me to live in the moment to appreciate each moment I have in this beautiful vacant landscape surrounded by weeds and clouds. Each morning I celebrated the sunrise over the old beet truck, the dog lolling around in the yard, the cat delivering her morning TED talk about an empty food bowl. I didn’t tell him how each day awakening him was a celebration that we had another day together, even if we were facing hard truths together. Until recently I didn’t know if I had a future with him but I knew I had a now.

And yet on day 135 we were given news our here and now may be shortened by his difficult and catastrophic diagnosis. So I am wrapping myself in the present moments trying to remember how all the fancy terrible things in my life have given me the greatest gifts and aren’t happening to us but for us.