A couple of days ago I met a friend of mine at Target for coffee.
I know, that seems really sad. What kind of loser has to meet for coffee at a Target? Well, I’ll tell you what kind: The kind that has some shopping to do. The kind that needs a place for the kids to play while said coffee is consumed. And finally, the kind that has a Target coupon for $2.00 off a Pumpkin Spice Latte.
Anyway, I was sitting there talking with my friend, who happens to be female, (that’s right, we were having a torrid affair in the Target snack bar. You should see what we do at the Safeway Deli counter) and the kids were eating teddy grahams and generally keeping the squabbling to a minimum.
Well, in the midst of this scene, an old man came over to us. He appeared to be in his sixties or early seventies. He walked over to where we’re sitting and said something innocuous, I don’t quite remember what. It was the kind of thing that old people are always coming up and saying:
“Oh, aren’t they adorable.”
“They grow up so quickly.”
“I bet they’re a handful.”
It was the kind of comment that, to me, is just one more throw away pleasantry, but to the person saying it, probably brims over with memories over their own children in a lifetime past.
This time, like most times, I didn’t think much of it. It was the kind of comment that was said in passing – a quick hello and a fleeting smile.
But he didn’t leave.
He just stood there for a second, staring at the kids. Then, he said, “You know, I had seven kids: five girls and two boys.”
We all smiled at this - so much meaning wrapped up in a simple phrase. It was easy to imagine this man’s household brimming over with seven children, the girls his little angels, the boys his little men. There would be times when the pure chaos of curling irons and facepowder and getting ready for prom would drive the three males of the household into a corner just to escape. And there would also be those times when the two boys might come home, rough and tumble from a corner football game, enough testosterone fueled energy arising from the two of them to drown out the noise of a hundred sisters.
No, it wasn’t hard to imagine how he looked back on these years of chaos with a slightly damp eyed affection. He was surely remembering nights of laughter around the new television and mornings of solemnity at church. There were tears after one of the girl’s break-ups and stoic sadness when his son didn’t make the team. There had been weddings and Christmas dinners and enough stories to last him well into his golden years and beyond. I saw that in his eyes, his eyes that were becoming wetter by the moment. But then he said something I didn’t expect, and the images changed.
“Yep, seven kids. I had to raise them all by myself, you know.”
The smile on my face darkened as it reflected these new images and I saw more clearly what those burgeoning tears really meant.
“She died, when she was only 48.”
He didn’t say what happened. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t important. It could have been cancer, or a car accident or a hundred other trivial causes. It didn’t matter. It simply mattered that she was gone.
“She was so beautiful,” he mumbled, his voice starting to crack. “She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I couldn’t ever get over the fact that she chose me.”
He fumbled in his pocket for his wallet. It was an old nylon wallet. The kind that was popular in the 80s, with a velcro strip to hold it closed. The kind no one would buy now a days.
The wallet was thin, impossibly thin. This wasn’t someone who had credit cards or shopping club memberships, or coupons; just a few dollars and maybe a drivers license. He opened the wallet, the velcro tearing as he pulled on it, and held it toward us. In the plastic sleeve was a single picture. It was an old picture. The kind they took in the seventies where the colors and slight blurriness made everything look slightly surreal. It was faded a little around the edges, but all in all in good shape. It had clearly been well taken care of.
It was a simple picture, a snapshot taken at home for no particular purpose. It showed him and his wife sitting on an old flowered couch. He was in the picture sitting right there, but you almost didn’t notice. Our eyes, like anyone’s would be, were drawn to the wife.
She was beautiful.
Behind the large framed glasses and out of style dress was an attractive woman with bright eyes smiling under the blue eyeshadow. He was there smiling too, as pleased then, as he was now, that she had actually chosen him.
He pulled the wallet back, folding it up carefully and sticking it back in his pocket. I mumbled something about how beautiful his wife was and he smiled, still proud. And then, he took one more look at my kids, said something else about how cute they were, or how quickly they grow up and then he simply said goodbye and started making his way toward the door, the tears coming on full now.
We were left sitting there, his grief and his memories still lingering around the table.
His wife has been dead for at least twenty years, maybe thirty and yet, his grief was right there on the surface. It took little more than the image of a few children playing to bring it all back.
I thought about this man who, for two to three decades, has been grieving the death of his spouse. He was like a character from a novel, incapable of moving past losing the great love of his life.
How many times must he have looked at that picture over the years?
How many times must he have shown it to total strangers?
His grief was right there on the surface, waiting for the slightest incident to rub it raw once again, never disappearing long enough for the scars to heal.
I can only imagine how great his sadness must have been when she first died, but eventually the demands of life would have taken over. There was a job he had to go to, because the family needed money and then there were all those kids to raise. I’m sure many of his friends told him to get remarried, but he wouldn’t even consider it. He had already found his one true love, and she was gone.
Eventually his joy and pride in his children would obscure his pain. He would revel in watching them grow up and seeing their mother slowly come to the surface in the curve of a nose or the certain pronunciation of a word, or in a particular gait in the way she ran.
Eventually, the kids would move out. One day it would just be him and his youngest daughter sitting around the dinner table, and then, eventually, he would be alone.
The house that had seemed to almost burst at the seems with the screams and joy of seven children and two loving adults, would now seem hollow and empty, with only the slight echo of memories to stir it.
Eventually there would be grandchildren, each one exhibiting at least one aspect of his beloved wife, carrying her beauty on for another generation.
And then, there would come retirement - the busyness of his days gone, his children out beginning their own lives, his grandchildren growing up and spending less and less time over at grandpas. He would enter his golden years alone.
Decades ago he had stood on his wedding day thinking about everything that was to come and he surely imagined the glory of these years, sitting with his beautiful wife on the porch, drinking coffee, reading the paper, holding hands.
And now, he’s largely just left alone with his memories, carrying them snugly in his pocket in a beaten up, out of style wallet. Now that the quiet is here, years of sadness and longing creep out of the darkness and buzz near the surface – arising at the least expected moments – while watching TV, or driving past an old restaurant, or when watching some young children play at a Target.
He’s sad, but he’s not sorry. He knows that he had something that few other people ever got a glimpse of. In a world of divorce and cheating and a dangerous complacency that seems to attack even the happiest of marriages, he knows that he had something special.
He had found “the one.” He had what every young man and woman is searching for, but so few ever seem to find. And yes, his one in a million romance ended sooner than he wanted, but still it was there, and in those few cherished years they had, they produced enough children, enough memories and enough joy to carry him through to the end of his days.
We live in a world where true love is, if not dead, at least muffled. Our news and televisions are full of stories of romance gone wrong. Self help books teach us to love ourselves and to deal with marriage as a compromise, or as a false ideal that has fallen short. As many marriages fail as survive and of those who do make it, few people are so naïve as to expect that the passion of the early years will still be around decades later.
But this man proves that maybe all that is wrong.
Life isn’t easy and love and marriage are rarely as simplistic as the images in our heads. But I do know this, I love my wife. She is the perfect match for my strengths and weaknesses and many neurosis. We are happy together and she is the person I most want to be with, and yet the privilege of having her in my life often seems less like a gift and more like a given – something that I can take for granted.
As sad as this man seemed, I want to be more like him. I want to live a life so full and so bursting with affection, that the loss of that would forever alter me.
We, so often, live safe lives, too afraid to really love or to really give ourselves to something, because we live in fear that the potential for pain might be to great.
I don’t want to think about losing my beloved wife, a woman who is so beautiful and who I still sometimes can’t believe was willing to marry me. But I do want to live in such a way that if I lost her it would devastate me. I want to live so fully, so passionately, so irrationally in love, that if I were to lose that love, I would be mourning it for the rest of my life.
I can’t say that this is how I am living now. I too easily succumb to safety and complacency. But every now and then I get nudged, reminded that safety and easiness has few downsides, but also few great rewards.
I want to risk it.
I want to live as if every day were a gift I may never get again.
I want to be an old man who accosts people in Target with pictures of my lovely wife and tells them of our great, great love and inspires them to shoot for something just as life altering, just as dangerous, just as outrageously extraordinary.
Something so beautiful that they can’t even believe they said yes.