Love After Death

A COUPLE of years ago, my sister, who adored my husband yet understood that he’d never recover from his illness, said to me, “If you took a lover I wouldn’t hold it against you. I probably wouldn’t want to meet him, and if you tell anyone I said this, I’ll deny it.”

Where was this lover supposed to materialize? At the local coffee shop? I rarely left our Malibu neighborhood during my husband’s illness--multi-infarct dementia, a disease related to Alzheimer’s in which the brain dies from multiple strokes. I pleaded with his doctor, “What is going on? Am I getting Douglas into tip-top physical shape only to give his brain a chance to die more?”

“Probably,” said the doctor, who explained that Doug could live another 10 years.

I thought about a friend whose father was dying in one part of the family home while her mother entertained a lover in another wing. The children never forgave her.

I didn’t have children. I got a bikini wax.

I signed up at an Internet dating site. It wasn’t until my first date spooned into his dessert that he asked the question I’d been dreading. “So, you’re a widow?”

“Soon-to-be-widow.”

“How soon?”

I wasn’t ready for this. Even though my husband had that blank, thousand-mile stare, he was still lovely to me. Whenever I helped him--emptying his urinal, brushing his teeth--he thanked me. At least once a day he said, “You look beautiful, darling.” No wonder I wasn’t finished loving this man.

So it was a shock when the lover I’d been longing for turned up just 10 days after Douglas died last February. I found myself in that awkward initiation of one’s youth. I was a 57-year-old virgin. Or that’s how it felt. After three years of celibacy, why hadn’t any of my women friends warned me about this complication? And Hollywood didn’t help, either. When Diane Keaton, a post-menopausal woman, takes Jack Nicholson as her lover in “Something’s Gotta Give,” she yells, “Oh my God, I do like sex!” Me too, but--

Jim, a friend from Chicago, had come to the West Coast on business and phoned. Before I met Douglas, Jim and I had been lovers--was that 20 years ago? Jim had known Douglas, but didn’t know that he’d just died. I asked if he’d like to come for dinner. He asked if I had a room that he could stay in so he wouldn’t have to drive back to Santa Barbara at night. I did.

In the first raw throes of grieving, nightfall delivered a shock of grief so black that it was dangerous to be alone. “The sunset’s lovely from the deck,” I said. “Come before dark.”

I can understand how it could seem otherwise, but I was paralyzed with grief when I invited Jim to dinner. If I’d had any idea his visit would lead to something more, I wouldn’t have been wearing frumpy sweats when he arrived. I showed him around our beach house--it was too soon to say my beach house. Years ago, this tall Chinese man wore a hippie ponytail; now 55, his graying hair was trimmed short, Dalai Lama style. It was a joy to see that he still had an easy laugh, a warm smile.

He put on a CD of old standards that he’d brought, starting with, of all things, Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” I poured us some Chardonnay. I told him that for the past 13 months Douglas had slept there--across from the couch in a hospital bed, rails up--and how I or one of his professional caregivers had slept near him, here on the couch where we were sitting.

Jim extended a hand. “Let’s dance,” he said.

Because the rugs had been taken up to make the floors wheelchair smooth, they were perfect for dancing. To move again, to dance in the very room that had held such illness, was a miracle. And to have an old friend who was single turn up at such a time was a gift from the universe.

“I like to kiss,” he reminded me.

I ordered dinner in.

Was this too soon? Was this disrespectful? A friend whose husband had just died thought my timing was perfect: “This is anti-death. This is what one does being fully alive instead of tiptoeing around death.”

Upstairs in bed, there was a softening, an opening up, an opening out, life expressing itself again.

“You’re like a 17-year-old kid,” Jim said.

Here’s where the “virgin” part comes in. Fifty-seven going on 17, my body had tightened up, and I was reduced to that embarrassing situation where the boy can do anything ... anything but that. Maybe this was nature’s awareness about the amount of intimacy I could handle.

Jim didn’t leave the next day. Or the next. He ended up staying 23 nights. Each evening we danced. He would twirl me out and swing me back in. Other times we held each other and swayed, slow dancing. This was dance as therapy, as foreplay. I never expected that, in between grief seizures, life could feel like heaven on earth.

One morning, as we reached out to each other in bed, he felt something sticking to his back. I pulled off a small brown wad and smelled it--an offering from Charmlee, my Yorkie.

We still wanted to make love, but we were laughing too hard. Each time we started we burst out laughing.

“Good grief,” I said to Jim, “where’s my grief gone?”

I knew it was still there. But Jim was an island to pull up on, a respite from the crashing waves. Because even with my lover in the house, grief still took its bite. Anything--a glimpse of Douglas’ handsome face in his obituary photo--could set it off.

“You’re not my grief counselor,” I reminded Jim, but in a way he was. A good way, and we both knew it.

If I’d been younger, I probably would have been planning a future. Now I had no expectations beyond the moment. Besides, Jim had never married. He was a hummingbird, forever visiting the flowers, always moving on.

One morning, raising his head on the pillow, he asked, “Were you upset with me last night? When I came upstairs, you were asleep.”

In a recent relationship, he explained, sometimes his partner had turned her back to him and gone to bed angry.

“Douglas and I had no time for that,” I said, explaining that I was just tired. “We knew life was too short.”

I understood the gift of reawakening that Jim had given me; I hadn’t understood the gift I’d given him. I was learning that Jim, or any man I would be with in the future, was the lucky beneficiary of my having had a lovely, easy relationship for 17 years. To turn away from your beloved, to waste a single night in anger--that’s the luxury of the young.

I’m still living that lesson a year later. A new friend just described my ability to extract the most from every day as dazzling. Exactly. When you watch someone die, you learn life is for the living. Today.