The Intimacy Reached Through Illness + Death
Mar 12, 2024
When you’ve walked your partner through illness + death, you develop a level of intimacy that exceeds anything else including sex + the birth of a baby.
Now you look at the couples around you, knowing that you and your person reached a different level of closeness.
It feels so deeply + painfully ironic, because while they still have each other, you are now on your own.
Nobody with an alive partner could get it.
The level of intimacy that is built when you you walk your person to the ends of the earth, and come back on your own.
I have a memory with Brian, when he was in so much pain that he could barely move. I was pushing him around the hospital in a wheelchair and there was a moment of stillness. We were alone in an elevator and he turned to me. Our eyes locked, as they so often did, especially near the end.
“How do people do this who don’t have a Mira?” he asked me.
The world froze, just like it did the moment we met, locking eyes across a crowded dance floor, my life opening up in front me in one, tiny, huge instant.
And then, “ding”, the elevator doors opened and the bright lights + sounds of the hospital enveloped us again, time moved onwards.
Dying is an experience that is truly inexplainable. And we did it as a team. Our closeness reaching new heights, impossible for other couples to understand.
Afterwards there was so much to process, to talk about. Except that he was no longer here.
In the early days, I’d often look around at couples I knew, just thinking, wow, they don’t know each other the way that we do.
And how brutally unfair - that they get to grow old together. They get the mundane day-to-day, the bedtime cuddles, the anniversaries, the listening ear. They get years + years in physical life that we have lost.
I still struggle to find the words for how ironically unfair this part of the widowhood experience feels.
And yet, it has created a deep well of knowing within me. A sense for the “beyond”, because I walked the love of my life there. And a strand of me stayed, because that is where he now resides.
I love that + I hate that. It is my superpower + my pain.
Both, and.
