“One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.” – on the two pillars of life, with regards to living a healthful one of quality and happiness, after a 75-year study, Dr. George Vaillant

 

There are things we grow up with in our heads, feeling that we were almost born knowing, that no one can tell us otherwise. Our names, our birth dates, the voices of our parents.

I grew up believing so firmly that I knew about when I would die – I thought everyone did – and knowing that I came with a different kind of purpose and that, tied to my journey in that purpose, I would experience the thing I believed most in, the thing that would fuel me to success to the end of my time: a transcendental love.

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When I thought about the way my life would end

I never saw it with too many people

surrounding my bedside, wishing farewells;

I never saw it with sickness or as a long-awaited greeting

that I or others could understand, with old age or disease;

I always envisioned it one of two ways –

abrupt, sudden, ripping me from the arms

of the earth in some way that only later surviving friends and family

would be able to find meaning in;

or, when I let myself forget the kind of world we live in,

peaceful and quiet, beside the love of my life

in the first rays of sunlight, like a sweet final adventure together;

such a departure I always saw as personal and

early in the day, so I wouldn’t have to rush on my way out

and could look upon the faces of my loves one last time;

this one falls serenely on my heart, and yet

every day that we move farther apart,

I see it more and more as a dream;

the death I’ll wish I could have had,

had you agreed to say it was okay to be vulnerable,

to love so completely, and to stay with me a bit longer.