CULTURE
Once Upon a Time. . .
Happily Ever After
By Nancy Olin
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, and yet only nine years ago, I moved
to the sea. Aphrodite the goddess of love, born out of the sea led me there.
Not literally, but deep from my consciousness, or so my therapist tells me.
I like the idea of me standing nude emerging from foam into a beautiful goddess on a half shell. On my journey I took along my husband and dog. The move was my mid-life crisis and while my dog, Bear went along happily, Chuck was not very delighted with the thought.
You see, he was already happy, for I had been his mid life crisis. What I mean by that is, he was older by 15 years when we married. Jung would say I married my Dad and maybe I did. At least I married the man I wanted to have as a dad. That great event, our marriage, had taken place twelve years before this move.
I had always been drawn to the ocean and to this new beginning of starting over. Quietly, secluded in this little mountain town by the sea.
Chuck was used to Chicago and his business was there, his friends, our friends, but because of me he would travel back and forth and our life began. You see, I had an ongoing illness and Chuck was very protective of that. He was protective of my happiness, my health, my life.
How did John Lennon put it?” Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans”. In a way that is what happened to us. As we nurtured my own illness and took care of my needs, my husband was dying, though we didn’t know it. Chuck would complain about this and go see a doctor about that and soon he was a Woody Allen kind of figure. Funny and neurotic but thankfully nothing was ever too serious until it was. And then it was over. Gone. Together for twenty years and the ending comes at 5:00 P.M. on a cold day in January just nine days after his 68th birthday.
He is part of me now, so deeply embedded that he channels through me. I live with him in the hereafter. He tells me he loves me, he rails at me that I spend my money so unwisely, and he’s proud that I’m writing, and loving our family so well.
Chuck left an ethical will. That is to say, he left a testament to his two sons and myself about what values he bequeathed to us. He says to me,
“So long together, so much shared, hard times and wonderful times, Chicago and now Stinson Beach, CA., I want to give you good health for a long life, a way to be peaceful while churning through your creative thrusts into the world. To respect yourself for your very special traits, for how much you give. I hope you will not rail too much against age, do as little as humanly possible to alter your natural beauty – you are so beautiful, so much more than when we met. You astonish me with your insights, your writing, and your advocacy for others. What a big heart you have, and I have been the beneficiary of that. This is more about what you have bequeathed me in life than I you in the hereafter. But anyhow, mostly it’s trusting yourself for all you are, not having to do too much to keep re-proving it, and having boundaries that protect you from giving too much away. I leave you with my hope that you in your own way, in your own life, live it to the hilt, keep it special, and stay loyal to our family for all the wonderful moments we’ve shared. You’ve taken a life more broken than it looked and patched it up enough to make a worthy one and a string of modest successes. The big successes for me are you.”
Not a bad guy, huh? The best. I put on Chuck’s army tags today hoping as I write that something of his gift for being able to tell a story rubs off on me. I have two rules for this story – that it begins with “once upon a time” and ends with “they lived happily ever after” for our lives are like myths. I wander through my life awake and sleeping while creating my own mythology.
Somehow Buddha doesn’t seem to work for me these days and my Jewish faith seems outdated or perhaps, more truthfully, I know so little of my Jewish faith having been a child of post World War II where assimilation was so present within many Jewish families. I do know that part of my love for Chuck was that we shared so many values. We are good people. We are curious and mostly we are honest. I am grateful. So grateful for this extraordinary life that I live. Growing every day and learning more.
I struggle with my writing wanting to be as good a communicator as Chuck. I struggle with the next step to take in life. And I try to follow my heart and not to be so hard on myself. It is beautiful now. The oceans waves I can hear from office window. The pelicans dancing and playing with the waves I view from my window. I look around and ponder adversity and how I have dealt with it and I think I just plainly look it in the face and stare it down. And then go make a martini. You know, that always helps.
A lot happens when you spend twenty years together. Chuck and my motto was always, “Go deeper”, and so we did. Perhaps that is why I can survive so well now. We gave so much to one another over the years that I have no regrets. And today he is still with me; almost like Velcro he follows me around like “The Shadow”. I look over my shoulder and there he is, lurking, a bit like Cary Grant and Fred Astaire he dances and tells me jokes, I still hear him humming show tunes in the shower.
So I began to see a therapist and I think Chuck led me to him. My therapist is seventy six years old, smart as a whip, like Chuck and said to me, “Let’s just say Chuck is in the room with us”, and he is. He is everywhere.
I walked outside this morning to speak to my gardener. His name is Bob, Bob the Cactus man. His fingers are the fingers that have worked in soil forever, knurly, dark, with dirt and beautiful. He said to me, ”You know Nancy you look better than you ever have. I remember when you first went through chemo, and then when your husband died and you were so helpless looking. Now even with all of your life’s problems you look strong and beautiful, more beautiful than ever.”
We both looked at one another and began to weep. I have you, Chuck, to thank for that. And she lived happily ever after.
