Stories to tell you.
Originally published at Examorata. Please leave any comments there.
There’s a story I’d like to tell you. Once there was a woman who met a man, and they got married the way you’re supposed to, and they had a kid the way you’re supposed to. Not much else went the way it was supposed to go, though. The ending was bad, I mean the ending of the marriage. The story doesn’t end there. This woman came up from something ugly, and even though I know in my heart it was the hardest thing to do, know in a way I can’t explain, she still had the courage to open her eyes to something beautiful and new. A rush of new love like the brightest burst soap-bubble on a high spring day, like kite-flying and roller-coaster-riding and slow-dancing for the first time ever, that rush. Something I’m not sure everyone gets, though I hope in my heart they do. I hope in my heart they get it once, twice, the very number of times they can bear. And think, think about coming up from something ugly and even letting yourself believe that could happen again. That’s what happened. There was another man, and they got married eventually, not because they were supposed to but because they could - or maybe because they couldn’t not. It was a tough road for both of them to get to that day, but they got there together and walked together from that day forward. They walked that way, in happiness, for seventeen years.
In a lot of ways it looks like that story ended a little over a week ago. That woman is my aunt, and last week her husband of seventeen years died suddenly and unexpectedly. I’m so sorry to have lost my uncle; I’m sorrier still for my aunt, that the story has come to this seeming end.
Life isn’t a narrative, however, no matter how dearly I want to turn it into one. I’ve told myself a lot of stories over the years, good ones and bad ones, and I believed them, too. Believed them to the point I found it hard to go out and deal with life on its own messy non-narrative terms.
Maybe if we believe too hard in the way the story should go we cheat ourselves out of the best parts. Maybe the courage to open our eyes and look forward is better than any story. Maybe that story I started to tell ended last week, but I don’t think that it did. I don’t think love disappears that easily; I believe it acts in our lives in ways we don’t understand and cannot know. The pain of that loss is unimaginable to me, and if I thought that I could write a story that would lift it away I would write it in a heartbeat. But I think sometimes I have too much faith in stories and not enough in people.
I hope, for her, that life still holds many surprises and joys, small and large. I hope for everything, and have faith in her to look for it. Life is more than a story, and each new day can say that a thousand times over.