I Thought I Learned All the Life Lessons When He Died

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Yep, I thought I learned all the life lessons when he died. I was wrong. When my first attempt at love post-cancer fell apart, I realized I have much more learning to do.

I decided to find love again two years after my fiancé died

My late partner was a short-timer in my life, though not by choice.

I think he even stayed longer on this Earth than he should have, laboring for breath through cancer-riddled lungs because he wanted so fiercely to live.

Jeff wanted to build the family that we started planning before his diagnosis — a diagnosis that came on our first (and only) Valentine’s Day together.

In the end, I had the opportunity to hold his hand for just 296 intense days that were filled with laughter and tears, love and death.

Two years after Jeff died, I wrote that watching him die taught me how to live.

Immediately after his death, I quit the corporate job that I hated and booked a one-way ticket abroad. I traveled through the world solo for a year, walked the Camino de Santiago, and started my own freelance writing business so that I could continue to travel while working remotely.

The thing is, I like having a partner. I love being in love. I still want that family that Jeff and I planned.

So, I did something else on that second anniversary of my late fiancé’s death. I decided that it was time to seek a partner again.

I rolled into his world in a campervan

I spent a lot of time grieving and healing on my journey throughout the world. There was meditation, yoga, spirit mediums, eastern astrologists, journaling, talking, saying his name out loud, crying. You name it, I tried it.

I even tried a relationship once before acknowledging that I wasn’t ready.

So when I determined that I was really ready again, I was honestly cocky enough to believe that I had learned enough about life and loss that the next person I chose to love would be the right person.

Just three months after I opened my heart for business, I rolled through the beautiful city of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho on the second day of a month-long road trip in a rented campervan, and I met a man who seemed to walk with me in lockstep.

At the end of that road trip, I returned to Idaho and, essentially, never left.

And then I got sick. And it all ended as quickly as it began.

I did leave, occasionally. I would leave to visit my family six hours away in Washington State. And I left when I got sick.

On March 7, I started a period that just never stopped. I bled for more than two months before I had surgery to remove a fibroid (a non-cancerous tumor) that had grown into my vaginal cavity.

When the action of making love was removed from our relationship, there was not enough feeling of love to withstand the distance, the sickness, the differences between us that were suddenly and glaringly exposed.

For instance, I want to build a family. Halfway through my 40th year on this planet, I realize that building a family may look very different. Adoption, perhaps.

The man in Idaho was done building a family. With two grown kids that are having kids of their own and a no-regrets vasectomy, he wasn’t bending on this one. So I compromised on that dream and started lobbying for a dog.

Shortly after my surgery, I spent a night sobbing into my pillow in my childhood bedroom in Washington. I had finally acknowledged to myself that I did not feel with this man in Idaho anything close to the love I felt with Jeff.

Stephen R. Covey wrote in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that:

In other words, love is a choice. It is work. It is sacrifice. The feeling that it brings, when things are good, is the reward.

I needed to make a choice.

But I didn’t make a choice

Rather than doing the hard (and right) thing and ending the relationship, I chose to fight for it. I texted him a song to break the silence that had grown between us, and then I drove to Idaho to try and work it out.

To make a long story short (I will tell it soon), he chose to go the opposite way.

In fairness, he chose for us. And he made the right choice.

I was forcing something because, with the benefit of hindsight, I chose to fall in love with the idea of love and to overlook the fact that my needs were not being met in that relationship, and that I had compromised on a dream that isn’t one I’m ready to let go of just yet.

It was no accident

There is a reason that these short-lived but profound connections feel at the time as though they cannot be an accident. I don’t think they are.

Whether they are a friend or a lover, a person who enters your life briefly but intensely will bring with them a life lesson for you. If you choose to dig into that lesson and take its learnings with you, then that person left you with a gift.

I am grateful for both of my intense but brief connections. One taught me how to live and how to choose love with the right person, and one taught me that it’s OK to let go when it is not the right person.

Sometimes even the most intense connections are just meant to be — as the saying goes — short and sweet.

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