The Rejection of Globalized Longing

My mother is having surgery tomorrow, which arouses a primal feeling that has nothing to do with what I think of her. There is an irrelevance of the woman's choices or how difficult those choices have, at times, made my own.

There is a reflexive feeling of, She can't be leaving. And, If she leaves, what happens to me?

When I think more about that feeling, my mind turns immediately to this man I share a home, and a life, with. For want of a better pseudonym, let's call him Guy. That is after all what he is.

Guy lost his father when he was only four, and was left with no memories of him. There are black and white pictures of a grinning man holding a small baby. Guy's father died of lung cancer in his late 40's, at the beginning of his small son's life. The man in the picture looks like the life of the party--the guy you would be working your way towards because he was so charismatic and fun. His son knows only this two-dimensional character, and sometimes works very hard at being the same.

His mother struggled, raising two children alone with no education and no experience other than being a homemaker. On a cold November day in something like 1983, Guy's sister was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. She was almost 14. For two years the little family struggled, and after a long fight she survived.

As simply as that, with nothing guiding them but the passage of time, Guy spent the rest of his growing up in small apartments in a green town on the coastline of Connecticut. I've seen many of these long-ago homes on visits to his hometown. He drives me along small streets that dead-end at the beach, pointing out various windows: When we lived here, that was my bedroom window...that apartment at the top was ours, and we loved that the living room windows faced the water.

So they lived, in the sunshine of this rocky shoreline, a small town, high-school-football-team-marry-your-high-school-sweetheart existence. Winters were long but the short summers glowed, as things glow in our memories.

Guy's mother died suddenly, when he was 25. She was a sickly woman and years of self-neglect caught up in one short burst. She left him and his sister from a small Connecticut hospital bed one night, shortly after a visit from Guy. It came as a shock to the siblings, regardless of how impossible to ignore her decline had become.

Guy and his sister mourned their mother's loss mostly in silence, both quietly tending a shared understanding that they were, at the end of the day, what each other had. They each married and had children; he divorced, leaving his son except for every-other-weekend visits that continue to this day. Life marched on, as it tends to.

His sister fell ill again in her early thirties. Cancer came back, this time in her breast. It claimed her this time, over the course of one long, shocking year. He was alone then, in a way that I believe most of us cannot comprehend.

Guy married again, divorced again, and gradually wound up where I found him--a single suburban father who occasionally dated, but not much in the past while. His work was mostly math and he spent his days in spreadsheets and financial models, but he wrote beautiful stories at night. He longed for the weekends with his son, two days of boyish abandon that had become their routine of almost a lifetime, and also continue to this day.

This is what flashes through me when I call my mother and no one picks up the phone. She is supposed to leave for the hospital tonight for that surgery tomorrow; something that has been seen somewhere inside of her is not favorable and must be looked at up-close. Volumes could be written about that sentence alone.

But as you know, the phone just rang and rang. No one picked up.

I think of Guy, my loving funny man, and the struggles we have had in finding peace with one another. There has always been passion between us, but it has taken many forms. When it takes the shape of anger, you'd do your best to stay away.

A friend of mine has said, It's a shame we never talk to our friends about the wonderful things our partners do. We'd never call a friend to say, He surprised me and had screens installed because I was upset that the apartment was always too hot or work was so horrible that when I came home crying, he sat me on his lap and made me talk until I was laughing. It would even feel weird to say it.

I believe that I have found a good man, and an equal partner. He is very flawed. I am not someone who sits patiently with the flaws of others, despite having very good defenses for my own. Together, we can be combustible.

We are also deeply loving, and silly, and grateful, and sharing the wish than that this other person us would walk like this beside us forever.

So the phone just rings and rings, my man sits at his desk on this sunny Sunday morning--he is angry at me, but pretending to be engrossed in his computer. I am angry at him, too. We pull so far away from each other in these moments that no apartment could be big enough for the two of us.

I am trying to imagine what it would feel like to be as angry as I am and to also know that there are people you feel like you should be calling because it's Sunday, people you were wishing you could call, but they will not pick up the phone. There are people you miss who will always be gone forever. It has been X or Y many years since their voices rang in your ears.

I will go to him now with my anger and my sorrow--both that we are fighting and that there is a corner of his soul that will always be missing something he doesn't have, can't have, and has lost forever.