Elise commentary: Love is not always linear

The week before he died, he asked me to talk to him about creativity and spirituality. I looked at my hands. It was not that I couldn’t meet his eyes; I was considering.

I was considering all the times I felt so small in his presence, a time when – to quote a phrase I heard not long ago – “I was hiding behind a blade of grass.”

He expected perfection in all ways, or so it seemed. The girls had to be pretty, slim, smart, successful, conservative. I suspect at least some of those adjectives applied to the boys too. I’m not sure.

I thought about the thousands of times I felt less-than, not even close to being acceptable. I’m sure some of my actions confirmed that fact. But then, there was also a wife who cried so many times about being invisible. What was her role? Was it just to churn out children?

She was bereft when a kind, handsome, unavailable man, who sat with her and taught her football, disappeared from her life suddenly. He had fallen in love with a teacher and, because of the circumstances, they had to leave town.

I was still in high school then. I didn’t understand what would be so traumatizing about that. I do now, and I can’t imagine the heartbreak.

From teen years on, he seemed to appropriate my friends: my girlfriends got flowers, my boyfriends a handwritten letter. How he found their addresses I don’t know. It felt chilling to learn this, and many friends later told me they felt confused and creepy too.

Some of his behaviors and confidences in me seemed even more uncomfortable. I did not need to know about the state of his marriage, his feelings about death, his thoughts about a look some stranger gave me when I was his traveling companion.

Through the years, I tried to hide, even ran away. Sometimes it felt like a tapeworm was winding around my brain, feeding off the logical elements and leaving only mush. An enormous lie he told on Christmas Eve of 1986 emboldened that worm to devour all logic.

I simply couldn’t do it anymore and had to escape. I wonder what was so broken in me that I could not fashion borders between the two of us. Things could have been different if I had known how to assemble a fortress, but I had no clue.

A few days before he died, he asked my husband and me to research Roman emperors, Roman poets, and other men of that era and their wives. He was particularly interested in their relationships.

You see, he was always thinking, always studying, always learning. That is a gift he bestowed upon us when we were little, and It has stuck.

One of the Roman poets I found was Catullus, who lived from c 84 B.C. to c 54 B.C. I had never heard of this person before.

I found a poem to his love, Clodia Mettelli, that evoked a strong emotion.

One small portion of the poem is this:

…”Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

then another thousand, then a second hundred,

then yet another thousand, then a hundred;

then, when we have performed many thousands,

we shall shake them into confusion in order that we might not know…

that there are so many of our kisses.”

If Catullus had not shared his poem as an expression of love, we would never have conceived of such beautiful words. In his life, Catullus’ passion for Clodia was unrelenting, and his poems about the relationship display striking depth and psychological insight.

What good is that kind of insight if it is not shared? That question was a discussion between him and me two days before his death.

The day he died, he asked for one more favor. Would I please type a note to Pope Francis, admonishing him for the lousy job he was doing? He also wanted to know why Francis did not canonize a bishop friend who, in his belief, should have at least been beatified decades earlier.

I am relieved that I never mailed that letter, though I have kept it as a remembrance of that day. So many mementos and, surprisingly, for me (as I cannot speak for anyone else) many positive ones.

And, finally, there is this, a summation of flash thoughts formed into a haiku:

Heaven needed him

The ad called for a scholar

That slot is now filled

This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Elise commentary: Love is not always linear