Karma

In my last post, I offered a condensed, Reader’s Digest version of my last relationship. As with any such account, it is only one version of the story. Gwen, of course, surely has her own.

As it turns out, at one point, she told it. In 2022, she gave me a copy of Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less, and inside she wrote a 90-word account of our first three years together. Given how often we broke up and then found our way back, I cannot say exactly where we stood at the time, or even what prompted the gift.

She entitled this “Karma.”

We met on my 65th birthday, two self-contained people looking for a spark, maybe love. And we found it, with a depth of recognition and connection that felt like tendrils reaching centuries back. Potent love was never in doubt. But however strong, that love didn’t pave over centuries-old rutted roads and ensure a gentle ride this time around. Alexander Pope says Hope Springs Eternal. That was our mantra for three years. And yet. He tried. I tried. Maybe the ride will be smoother in another century. Hope still springs eternal.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

This love of mine
Had no beginning
It has no end
I was an oak,
Now I’m a willow
Now I can bend
And tho’ I’ll never
In my life see you again
I still stay
Until it’s time for you to go

(“Until It’s Time For You To Go” — Buffy Sainte-Marie)

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The Shape of What Didn’t Hold

Not long ago, I wrote about Lauren Kessler’s Everything Changes Everything, a memoir that revolves around love, loss, and what it means to keep on living. It is, in many ways, a simple proposition. We form attachments. We lose them. And then, ready or not, we find a way to move on.

My last significant relationship, with Gwen, comes to mind when I think about all that.

We met on her sixty-fifth birthday, in March 2019, when I was in my early seventies. I remember attaching a certain significance to that date, as if the timing itself carried meaning. At our age, it felt possible, even sensible, to imagine that what began then might be the last relationship for each of us. There was comfort in that idea. An appeal. A sense of arrival. Or at least of being done with new beginnings.

What followed, instead, was the start of a pattern that led to considerable pain for both of us.

We broke up and then reconciled many more times than I can count. Our endings never quite held. Sometimes they were quiet, other times louder and more-obviously decisive, but during the five years we tried, I became conditioned to believe that none of them were truly final.

She had many ways of reappearing in my life: a text; a voicemail; a call; more than once, a knock on my door. At one point, a sighting on the bike path resulted in a conversation that turned into something else. Then, despite whatever resolve I had constructed in her absence, I would find myself drawn back in.

In March 2020, I started back into therapy. It was there that I was introduced to Attachment Theory, which provided a framework for understanding what felt, at the time, both confusing and inevitable. In simple terms, some individuals move toward closeness when a bond feels uncertain, while others move away when the closeness feels threatening. The anxiously-attached partner leans in, trying to secure the connection. The avoidantly-attached one withdraws, trying to protect a sense of independence. Neither position feels optional from the inside; people are, in many ways, hard-wired from early in life.

Gwen and I fit this pattern with an uneasy and predictable precision. The more distance I felt, the more I tried to close it. The more I tried to close it, the more she needed to back away. While there was an intensity to our reunions that suggested a renewed closeness, it rarely held for long.

Over time, I came to understand a bit more about her beginnings. As the oldest child, early in life she was left with her grandmother for a time while her mother went on to build a life that did not include her. I do not pretend to draw straight lines from that fact, but it is not difficult to imagine how early abandonment might echo later in life, shaping how closeness is approached and how distance is managed.

Of course, it is only fair to acknowledge that I brought my own baggage into this relationship. My mother was physically present throughout my childhood, but I rarely experienced her as emotionally available or supportive. Looking back, it is not hard to see how that absence, of a different kind, may have left its own imprint, shaping my need for reassurance and a hyper-sensitivity to distance.

We even tried, toward the end, to step out of our destructive pattern and call it “friendship.” That, too, proved to be fraught with difficulty. Too much had been said, and unsaid. Too many endings had left us wounded and scarred. Whatever ease friendship requires, we had long since worn it down.

In the end, the final separation came not with a shared understanding, but with a story that could hold. She came to see me as the one who had wronged her, and while I did not share that view, I came to understand how it made a clean ending possible where none had existed before. She stopped knocking on my door.

Now, as I approach my seventy-ninth birthday, I see quite clearly how much of this decade of life was spent inside a relationship that just did not have enough positive emotional adhesive to endure. We’re now over two years down the road from our last contact and I still think of all the painful times shaped by that push-and-pull dynamic. As Kessler reminds us, life continues, making its way around and through both the love and the loss.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

I was on my way to you and I was worried
I was all torn up and nervous cause I knew that you’d be gone
I knocked and crossed my fingers while I waited
And I couldn’t hold the teardrops when I walked away alone

It’s all over, it’s all over, my heart echoed
Every minute that you cry for her is wasted don’t you know
It’s all over, it’s all over, so forget her
Stop your cryin’ turn around and let her go, let her go, boy
Let her go

(“It’s All Over” — Johnny Cash)

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Horizontal Compatibility

Online dating, at my age, raises questions one does not always anticipate. Some of them, it turns out, are… positional.

Not long ago, a woman on OurTime (a dating site for seniors) recently “liked” my profile. I liked her back and sent a message suggesting that we meet. Then: nothing. Four weeks passed. I ultimately filed the whole thing away under “oh, well.” I admit, I forgot all about her.

But eventually she wrote back.

So then I found myself, somewhat to my own surprise, heading out for my first first date since March 2019. This fact alone felt like an event worth noting.

The meeting itself, at a local Starbucks, went well. More than well, actually. We talked for more than an hour and a half without effort. The conversation had range, some depth, even a bit of spark. At the end, there was a hug that she initiated. Not the standard-issue, socially-prescribed hug, but a long, sustained, quietly-mutual embrace. The kind of physical contact that lingers just enough to suggest possibility.

I drove home thinking, well, that was nice.

The next day, I wrote to say I’d enjoyed meeting her and would be glad to get together again.

Her reply was, and I quote:

“id like to meet again if we spend most of that time hugging. Hmm where would that be possible”

Now, as suggestions go, this was not one I was inclined to reject. I even confessed, in a moment of candor, that I might qualify as a very touch-deprived individual. And so it seemed that we had entered into a mildly flirtatious exchange, one with a surprisingly clear agenda.

But then came the practical question: where does one go to engage in sustained, low-ambiguity hugging?

She thought maybe a park. A blanket. Perhaps a picnic.

And now it is here is where the narrative takes a decisive turn toward the absurd.

I explained, as plainly as I could, that lying on the ground — grass, sand, or any other surface that requires one to interface directly with the planet — is not something my back, hip, and leg nerves are inclined to negotiate well. This was not about getting up afterward. This was about being down there in the first place. So, yep, I had reservations about this idea.

And let’s be clear: we are talking about two 78-year-olds here. The image of both of us gracefully arranging ourselves on a blanket, then remaining there in some extended state of horizontal embrace, begins to feel less like romance and more like a logistical exercise requiring advance planning and possibly the temporary services of a personal aide.

Her response was brief and decisive. Again, I quote:

“Regretfully, if you’re not capable of laying down on a blanket with me, I guess we’re not a match”

And just like that, a door closed.

There is something almost admirable in the specificity, simplicity and clarity of the rejection. Not about conversation. Not about compatibility. Not about chemistry. Entirely about: blanket viability.

One imagines her revising her profile to include: “Must enjoy meaningful conversation and prolonged horizontal hugging in outdoor settings.”

Rejection, however it arrives, still has a way of landing, though. And land it did. Not dramatically, but just enough to be noticed, a small shift in the internal weather. And then, as these things tend to do, the storm passed, leaving behind the memory of that unexpectedly good hug.

Thank you, universe, for that.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

And when the night falls, and when the sky falls,
I long for your embrace.
Another daybreak, another heartache,
I long for your embrace.

(“Embrace” — Bee Gees)

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Everything Continues

I just finished reading Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss and a Really Long Walk. At first, I thought this to be sort of a rather odd title. But it turns out to be spot on.

The author is Lauren Kessler, who lives here in Eugene, Oregon, or at least somewhere in the countryside around our city. I have known of her, heard her name now and again over the years. She has written several books and is considered a local literary presence. I had not read any of her earlier works, but last fall I came across her three-part series on food insecurity in our new, local online newspaper. I was struck by the depth of her reporting and the vividness of her writing. She placed herself in the story, not as a distant observer but as a participant, and what emerged were word pictures that stayed with me.

At the time, I learned that she would be publishing a new book in February, so I reserved a Kindle copy to be delivered on the publication date.

So that is how I came to know of the book. But I admit that I was also drawn to it, and ordered it, because of its promised discussions of love and loss. If you know anything about my writing, you know that I return to those topics with some regularity here in Musings. As it turns out, those themes are inseparable from the journey she undertakes.

The “really long walk” that Kessler documents is her journey along the Camino Francés, the ancient 500-mile pilgrimage that begins in the south of France, crosses northern Spain, and concludes at Santiago de Compostela, a famed Roman Catholic cathedral. The “love and loss” in the title refer to the twin deaths of her husband Tom, to cancer, and eight months later, her daughter Lizzie, to a drug overdose.

After these back-to-back earth-shaking tragedies, she writes that she desired “a solitary, immersive adventure, a physical, logistical, emotional challenge that would catapult me out of my life.” Prior to this, she had little familiarity with the Camino. She did almost no research about its history or even about how to navigate it. She notes, somewhat wryly, that she had not even seen Martin Sheen’s 2010 film The Way, a story about this very journey that nearly everyone she met along the path seemed to know well.

I came to the book with some prior familiarity. I had seen the film, read Shirley MacLaine’s earlier account, The Camino, and at one point in my life had even considered making the journey myself. That background did not diminish the experience of reading Kessler’s account. If anything, it sharpened my awareness of what she chose to notice, and what she chose to leave unexplained.

The book is organized in a way that draws the reader in completely, or at least that is how it worked for me. Alternating chapters follow the chronological progress of her walk, interspersed with non-time-linear accounts of the lives and deaths of her husband and daughter. Early on we learn that her husband’s torturous path through cancer led him to make use of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.

Kessler frames this work as a memoir, and that it is. But as I read, I could not help but experience it as something akin to a form of ethnography, an inquiry not only into a journey across a physical landscape, but into the social and emotional domains of grief. What emerges is a set of richly detailed first-person narratives, both of the walk itself and of the intimate, difficult terrain of illness, addiction, dying, death and loss. She observes not only the world around her but also her own responses, occasionally with a level of candor that does not place her in the most favorable light.

One passage in particular stayed with me. She describes her reactions to friends and acquaintances who attempted to express sympathy and support. She found herself recoiling from the superficial, hollow-sounding sentiments such as “sorry for your loss.” The observation follows from an earlier, critical blog post of hers entitled Performative Condolence.

I found myself sitting with her perspective for a while. Not because I agreed with it entirely, but because I recognized it contained some element of truth. Grief unsettles not only the person who carries it, but also those who try to approach it. We reach for familiar words, knowing even as we speak them that they will fall painfully short. Yet we offer them anyway because, for most of us, silence feels worse.

Kessler does not provide a tidy resolution to that discomfort. What she offers instead is something more useful: a sustained, honest account of what it is like to keep moving forward when the life you knew has been irrevocably altered. The walk becomes less a quest for answers than a way of continuing.

In that sense, the title is not strange at all. Everything changes. And then, somehow, of course, everything continues.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

As I walk this land with broken dreams
I have visions of many things
But happiness is just an illusion
Filled with sadness and confusion
What becomes of the broken-hearted
Who had love that’s now departed?
I know I’ve got to find
Some kind of peace of mind

(“What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” — Jimmy Ruffin)

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Meditations on Time

Here I am, at age 78, seemingly surrounded by stories about time. These stories naturally have a way of turning my thoughts toward how short my own time may be.

I just reread a novel in which every adult on the planet receives a box containing a string that reveals exactly how long they will live. And I’m recalling the television comedy about a moral accounting system that tracks a person’s life here on Earth. Finally, there’s the recent film that imagines we get to choose the precise form our eternity will take.

I did not set out to braid these snippets of our popular culture together. They braided themselves. At this age, time insists on being the subject.

The reminders are constant. Obituary columns, for one. My personal calendar, for another, which now includes far more medical appointments than it once did. Routine blood work. MRI, CT and DEXA scans. Follow-ups, with each visit carrying the distinct possibility that this will be the one where the doctor pauses too long before speaking. Most of the time the news is ordinary. “See you in six months.” But the suspense never quite disappears.

In Nikki Erlick’s 2022 novel The Measure, a mid-life character suggests that a string long enough to reach age eighty would count as good news. When I read that passage, I felt a small jolt. Eighty no longer feels like a distant horizon. It is a number that is uncomfortably close.

If I opened my box today, I would automatically have a long string. The real question would be: how much longer? A year? Five years? Ten? More? Though If I died today, surely no one would lament that I was gone before my time.

All of which leads to other concerns. How many more years would I want if they are shadowed by increasing pain — or other physical or mental decline? Longevity, at this stage, is not automatically the goal. There are conditions.

The Good Place, the four-season television series originally airing on NBC (and now available on Peacock), begins with a moral scoring system; every human action or interaction earns positive or negative points. An endless array of cosmic accountants supposedly keeps track of these tallies someplace up there in the sky, and when you die your final count decides your destiny. It is morality, and judgment day, rendered as a dispassionate spreadsheet.

At 78, that premise feels less like satire and more like a quiet audit. I find myself reviewing my own ledger. Have I been good? Not necessarily accomplished. Nor productive. But good?

My entries must be mixed. I have lived and loved imperfectly. I have hurt people I did not intend to hurt. There are relationships that did not endure. Some ended gently. Others did not. Even now there is sadness attached to those chapters, a sense that certain conversations might have gone differently if I had been wiser, braver or simply more skilled.

I sometimes wonder whether those endings count against me, or whether they merely show that I kept trying to connect and sometimes failed.

The show ultimately dismantles its point system, though. Life, it suggests, is far too entangled for simple math. Growth matters more than totals; it matters more than being flawless.

What lingers for me now is the series’ ending. Even paradise becomes hollow if it stretches on forever. In the final season, the characters are offered an exit. They step through one last door when they feel complete. Eternity with no ending, the show suggests, flattens meaning.

So, I wonder: How, ultimately, will I measure my existence? Will there ever be a time when will I feel complete?

Those questions followed me into the 2025 film Eternity, now on Apple TV, where humanity is invited to choose the form one’s forever will take. The idea sounds appealing at first. Pick your paradise. A tropical beach, for example. Perfect weather. Endless calm.

But what would that mean after a thousand years? Ten thousand? How could any single scene, no matter how beautiful, sustain significance without limit? Without scarcity?

Part of what makes a late-life conversation more vivid is precisely that it may not be repeated endlessly. Scarcity is what gives weight to life’s ordinary moments.

If I knew the precise length of my string, maybe I would live differently. I might rush to repair what remains frayed. Or I might grow cautious, conserving energy. Uncertainty leaves me in between. Aware of the limit, but not of its measure. Isn’t it that uncertainty that keeps life from becoming either frantic or complacent?

If there is a ledger somewhere, I hope it records effort. That it shows I kept revising myself. That I tried to mend what I could. That I did not stop growing simply because the horizon drew closer.

I am not eager to open the box. And I am not certain I want a tropical eternity with no horizon. I only know that the ticking is audible now. Doctor visits. Quiet evenings. Old relationships to ponder. Meditations on time.

Age 78. Still adding to the ledger.

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Poetry Selection: The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

-Mary Oliver

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