i share the same sentiment as you do… it is really nice sharing life with someone

(as I did), but it isn’t always up to you.

Tomorrow would have been my husband’s 50th birthday. He lost his life in a sudden and wholly unpredictable accident abiyt 5 1/2 years ago. Now I walk on into old(er) age on my own. Not what either of us would have choosen, but what happened. Nothing was left unsaid between us except one last final conscious “Goodbye.” His last message, written on a watercolor sketch he’d made for me a few days before, “With all my heart, love…” his name.

We thought we would grow old together. We did not. I thought he was the love of my life; and I his… this may actually be/have been true.

But if you lose someone you love so dearly, if you miss sharing your life so intimately (as jopurple says), isn’t the best tribute, the only one, really, to keep on loving, even though the form and fashion is different, even though you don’t have the shared language of decades behind you?

I go back and forth between saying, “He was the love of my life” and “He was the love of the first part of my life” or “early life.”

I don’t say all this to be morbid. Just to say, you never know. Life just is unpredictable. Life is worth living, love is worth loving, and both are built on a foundation of pure unknowable risk and worth it anyway.

There are a lot more unhappy marriages than happy ones out there. To everyone who loves their mate, celebrate it, celebrate it. “Live each day like it was your last” is not just n inspirational saying. It’s a fact. It might be.

A day that was like any other was our last. How good that when we went our separate ways (thinking it was only for a few hours) the last thing we said was “I love you.”