An image has been stuck in my head--an image I got from a docudrama medical show of all places--of an ER intern telling a woman her husband had just died. The intern was younger than me, and slight, but had a kind face and weariness all over him. It seemed like he could draw his hand from his lab-jacket pocket and weariness would be tangible, squirming in his hand like an infant.
I am stuck on the image of his hands on hers as he told her they had been unable to save her husband. Small, stark hands around even smaller, dark female ones, and I tried very hard, for one second, to imagine what his hands felt like on hers. The last person before that to hold her hands was probably her husband...
If that would have been me, I'm afraid that I would have obsessed on that touch, his tried kindness--I'm a sucker for the phantom limb moments of our life time...the times it's the last time we see or speak to someone and don't know it. We carry these around with us, and they get better, then stun us when we least expect it, like when stupid XM Radio plays "Perfect Blue Buildings" or a smell drifts past us. I'm glad that people, some anyway, have connections like this.
I told Gene that I was tired of being the second choice to everyone when it came to who they loved. The women in my family are hopelessly programmed to put the men in their lives, be it husbands, sons, or brothers, first. This isn't anyone's fault--it's just part genetics and part being from West Texas. In the case of my previous attempts to be a priority in a significant other's life, Gene observed that I date very selfish people who become obsessed quickly then loose interest...quickly... I added that the last few have been experiments in emotional torture--I was always someone's second or third or forth pick, and when one of the higher numbers came back, I was easily removed.
I looked at my toes, sighed, and repeated to her, "I'm so tired of always being the second choice." I was crying. That's what I do now. I look at my toes and cry.
She said to me, as matter-of-factly as the color of the walls, "You're always my first choice."
When she says things like this to me, I do not question it. She is one of three people on the planet that I do not question when they say things like this to me. In truth, I have three people in my life who will always be put before anyone else. Three people who it will never be an option to not have around me. My love for them--my ability to love them--comes naturally, without hesitation. With others, though it sounds cold to say, I have to make myself. With others, love and friendship is sometimes an obligation, truly a commitment.
We are created with the capacity to love people like this so that we will want to live. Even if it is just for a few people. A few that it hurts more to imagine their sadness than to imagine your own long broken life.
I read that when Steven Curtis Chapman's teenage son accidentally hit and killed his five year old daughter, he remembers stopping the car and saying to his son, "Your mother and your father love you. You are in no way responsible for this. We're going to make it." He said it was because he knew that he had just lost one child, and he was determined to not lose another.
I can't imagine being loved that much.
To be forgiven without thought or fear.
To be loved with boundless determination.
That love is the love of Beethoven. The love of myths.
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