Forty-Nine Days and Still Counting

We came to each other later in life. I was 54; he was 60. We had both just been through unusually bad times, me a divorce that sucked the self-esteem out of me. He had won a intense battle with cancer. We were road-weary and searching for peace and quiet, a night out for dinner, a movie in a walk-in theater, companionship. We did not expect to fall in love. That part came as a surprise. Maybe it shouldn't have. Maybe that first date with not enough minutes to get everything said ... maybe that should have held a clue. Maybe the phonecall afterwards, to finish the conversations started over dinner ... maybe that should have been another clue. He was still traveling, making his living, with a myriad of phonecalls throughout my day ... from East Texas, then the Panhandle, then the Valley, then the Hill Country, they came from Denver, Bozeman, Cheyenne, Albuquerque. We never talked long, ten minutes, but we talked often, four or five times a day. He shared things he saw on the road, white-out conditions on mountain passes, elk in a field far from the highway, a herd of palamino horses in a snowy meadow. As soon as he was back at home base, we would rush together, at his place or mine, talking, talking, talking, walking the dog, playing with the kitty. He came with a chainsaw the day a rogue wind knocked a big pecan limb down onto my fence. He laughed and talked while he cut the limb into logs. Later, after the wood had cured, he cooked pecan-smoked steaks over his open firepit one cold starry night at his land. 

Ten months after our first date, we moved in together. My house was too small; his too ramshackle. We bought a house on three acres, nestled under a motte of live oaks, just outside town. The house had been abused, so we started right in fixing it up, new floors, new carpets, new appliances, new paint. He joked that it was too big of a house for him. "I could be happy in a teepee," he said. I bought a ceiling fan with a teepee light fixture to replace the broken fan in our bedroom. He bought a hot tub. We gave everything names, the place was the Buffalo Wallow because a buffalo had been a recent resident, eaten every blade of grass and left tufts of buffalo fur hanging in the fences. The Tropical Room was the enclosed sun porch, the first room he decorated by himself with wicker furniture he bought arranged around all my house plants. The Banishment Room was the extra room off the garage with its own bathroom where guests could stay and feel, as his son once said, "Banished from the main house." My son called it the "Bonmyers B&B."

Years went by, and as they did, we grew closer. Each new milestone, each tragedy, closed any gaps we may have still had between us. Trust is sometimes the hardest part of a new relationship, especially when you're older, and road-weary. As we went through life trials together—the loss of his son, the loss of my dad, his mother, a close aunt, my brother, our dog—our trust in each other became complete.

We talked about getting married. The subject was broached many times. But we didn't want to ruin what we had. He said we were "Happily unmarried." He said that to everyone. He had failed three times at marriage, and I had failed twice. Five failed marriages was not a good track record. We were better at what we had, better at being married in our hearts than on paper. After 16 years, we were soulmates, lovers, best friends, companions, confidantes. Our families were melded in our minds, too. We loved them all, on both sides. 

When I think back now that he's gone, I realize we rescued each other. One of his childhood friends sent me a note the other day, thanking me for making Wayne happy, finally, for the last years of his life. He did the same for me. He was my ballast and my anchor, my cheerleader and my protector, my helpmate and my north star. He often talked me off the ledge when I was overly stressed. He took care of me when I was sick. He doctored my wounds and gave me generous back rubs. He made me laugh, and he made me think. He was my intellectual equal and I loved that so much. We finished each other's sentences. 

It shouldn't have worked. He was a country boy, a cowboy, and I was a definite city girl. But there was enough of me in him and him in me, that somehow it did work. Most of the time it was effortless. We liked nothing better than to sit out on our deck with a pet nearby, coffee in the morning, watching the birds on the feeders, listening to the day come awake—the quiet times we had both needed when we first met. We said from time to time, we'd had enough drama in our lives to last us forever. We didn't need more.

I think of him now encouraging me to go do things, to make changes to the house, to get out in the world, to continue on without him. I remember him saying during hard times when life had dealt its blows, "There's no finish line. You just have to soldier on." And so 49 days in,
this is me soldiering, grateful to have had him in my life.

Onward ... (somehow)