Writing While Grieving 18: Un-Together, All These Lonely Days Are Affecting Me

The Last Time Before the Last Time

• One more for the road.

[Previously]

Dear B,

Well, I’m home again. I always thought going home was supposed to give people a good feeling. I feel rotten. I miss you so much I can hardly stand it. I do a good job of being fine at the bus station, but when I go home I want to cry. I’m so glad this is the last time we have to say goodbye because I just wouldn’t be able to take any more. All of these lonely days are affecting me. I think this is about the 12th time we’ve had to leave each other. That’s way too many times (about 12 too many).

That was eighteen-year-old me after leaving my future wife on my last visit before we would be together permanently in just five more weeks. The long twenty-month period of being apart was almost over. Our writing during this last stretch of letter-writing is a mixture of longing and happiness, and the happiness is so palpable that it makes our writing emotionally draining to read.

I was living in a very unhappy house. As if my tumultuous childhood hadn’t been bad enough, I’d lost my mother just seven months before I wrote this letter. I lost my brother less than two years before that, and my sister-in-law a year before that. I had grief in my marrow. My father was already with someone else, a married woman with three kids. I had no idea about the series of traumas that were yet to come. But in September, I would be far away. My girlfriend was coming back to my town for the summer, and then, in September, she would leave for college once again, but this time, I would be sitting beside her on that plane.

Our life of being permanently together was about to begin. In our letters, we are bursting with anticipation over this. We speak so tenderly to each other. We treat each other so sweetly. It’s difficult reading. I can only stand a few at a time.

It’s so difficult because we are so full of hope, and we called our recent parting our “last goodbye.” In our happiness, we overlooked one thing: It wasn’t our last goodbye.

There would be one more. And with this goodbye, we would be permanently un-together.

You can dry your eyes
But you can’t hold the impossibly untogether

All of these lonely days are affecting me. I can’t take any more.