One way or another, I'll decide by tomorrow. For today, I'm still here and so is this year. It is a year that started out okay but went downhill fast. Like many journalists, I've struggled with the worst job market of my career. So many journalists have left the trade that it's a safe bet more are unemployed than employed.
But it isn't in the professional realm that my year was won or lost. Today, as the year ends, I need to close a chapter on how I feel about somebody special. Despite all that has happened, this is a love story, pure and simple. And also tragic, like many, though not all love stories.
She met me through my words, right here on this blog. Before we ever met in person, she knew me through my writing. In that way, our relationship was perfect. I tried my best to write in an emotionally honest way and someone else found that appealing enough to fall in love with me.
Over the next four years, she did more wonderful things for me than anyone deserves -- she refurnished my shabby apartment, helped me learn how to live more frugally, and nursed me to health when I was ill.
She joined my family, getting to know all of my children, who all came to love her.
There's more about love that we will never know than what I or anyone else can describe. How we fall, why we fall, both into and out of love.
Her dreams were special, but not all of them proved to be realistic. For a long time, I encouraged her to write a book she was working on. To this day I believe if she wrote it it would be a best-seller.
But she abandoned that project, and I'm not sure why. Every month, for one of her assignments, she had to collect American sayings, such as "that's the way the cookie crumbles," etc., cliches. I proved to be very good at providing her ten or fifteen of those every time she asked me.
She also loved to travel and we took many great trips together -- to Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, New York, Vancouver, Tokyo, Hakune, and many, many other places. Sometimes we would just drive around the Bay Area, staying in towns on its outer edges, while she practiced learning how to drive.
The day she earned her driver's license was a happy one in our family. My youngest child made a congratulations sign and put it on our front door.
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We loved to discover new diners and cafes that serve good, cheap meals, and we found a bunch that -- even after decades here -- I'd never before visited. When I go back to them now, it is always with a heavy heart.
She is a very quiet person, reserved, somewhat shy, and she says she needs a lot of time to be alone and quiet. At first, I was too noisy around her, but with time, I quieted down as well.
She taught me so many things about food and cooking that it is hard for me to go into my kitchen now without remembering one of her tips.
It would be hard to find a kinder, more compassionate heart. Her empathy for me -- and the struggles of being a single parent in a bad economy, aging and worried about the financial havoc created by a bad economy and unfortunate events like an IRS audit -- literally got me through. I never could have survived some of these challenges on my own.
I know that now.
Since she's been gone, my entire world has grown colder, darker, and much, much lonelier.
You never can tell the people you love what they mean to you too many times. I know I tried to tell her over and over but somehow I must not have done it enough.
And that is how this year ends.
-30-
2 comments:
Add my voice to those expressing the hope you keep writing. I have been very touched by this blog.
Dan Rosenheim
Dan: Thank you! I'm sure you can appreciate how hard it is, as a journalist, to do this -- I never know if I am crossing some invisible line that I shouldn't cross. But my hope is that simply by being honest it might help someone else -- somewhere, somehow. Come to think of it, maybe that's why I became a journalist.
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