After 16 incredible, amazing years with the man that I loved almost beyond reason, my sweet, organic life changed last week, in the blink of an eye. Dave left this world behind last Tuesday and now I miss him more than I imagined possible. When we finally resigned ourselves to the fact that he wasn't ever going to get better and that his time was growing short, I tried to imagine how it was going to be without him, simply to prepare myself for the inevitable. When the time actually came, it was 1000 times harder than anything I was capable of conceiving.
While you try to prepare yourself for the eventuality of a death, especially when someone is fighting a disease as sinister as cancer, nothing, and I mean N-O-T-H-I-N-G, prepares you for that moment when you realize that this person you knew and loved is really and truly gone. It is like something grabs your chest and squeezes the life out of you, too. It is like a wave of unimaginable agony that strikes you powerless and paralyzed. You can't breathe, you can't move, you can't even think. All you can do is be held in the grasp of that moment while the world stops around just you and everything else keeps moving. When that grip suddenly is let go, it feels like the entire bottom of the universe has dropped away and left you suspended, beyond space and time. And then, the shockwave of reality hits you and you are forever changed.
I have thought long, hard and much about my life with Dave and I keep coming back to the same thing. We loved each other without reserve, without boundaries, without most of the trappings that come with a marriage sometimes. We never focused on careers, we had both done that in the lives we lived before we met. Instead, we decided to forgo the pursuit of happiness through things as artificial and man created as money, position and power because those things are worthless in the end. We vowed to focus all of our energies on the power of love, both between each other and for Mother Earth and her children.
In all our years together, we never quarreled (of course, we differed in opinion sometimes but how could we use our individual strengths if we didn't express them?), spent less that 2 dozen nights apart, expressed our love for one another at every opportunity and left absolutely nothing left unsaid between us. We worked side beside for most of those 16 years, first in our store at the beach and then at the Farm for the last decade. Every effort was made to insure that we remained able to spend our time and be together as much as possible.
We tried to guide and support each other in everything we did but Dave was always the better teacher. The lessons he taught me have shaped the person I am today. I never felt like I gave as much as he did in that regard, but he always said that I taught him what you could accomplish through the power of love. He taught me that it is okay to just be who you are, that growing as a person is necessary for one to move forward on their path toward enlightenment and that fear is the mind killer. I no longer fear many things because of Dave's lessons and that has given me great peace and serenity on many levels. His most important lesson was that I was worthy of being loved by someone like him - intelligent, wise, spiritual, amazing, kind, gentle and the most beautiful soul I have encountered in my 50+ years. That was a lesson he never tried to teach because he was too humble to think he was any of those things I mentioned.
We both truly believed that we were soul twins, joined for eternity and that comforts me greatly. I will miss him in ways I can't yet imagine. But there is so much of Dave, and who and what he was, in me now that he is with me still, in every fiber of my being and always will be there.
Namaste, my love, good journey.
