Thursday, 6/13

I don't know why, but to me those are the saddest headstones you see when walking through a cemetery.

As you know, Loraine and I spend a lot of time in Marquette's Park Cemetery, often just walking through it on a nice summer day and enjoying the beauty of nature all around us. Recently we've started gazing at headstones for one certain thing, a thing that the thought of makes me shake my head with a little bit of grief.

Here's an example--

Believe it or not, it's not the fact that a father and daughter apparently died in the same year that makes me sad. Nope; instead it's the fact that Alma lived another 56 years after her husband died and never remarried. She, from the looks of it, spent the last five and a half decades of her life alone.

That's what makes me sad.

This isn't the worst example we've seen, either. One of the guys Loraine's researching died in Normandy just after D-Day, just a few months after marrying a woman. His widow never remarried; she died in 2004 sixty years after her husband was killed in 1944. After being married just a few months she spent the rest of her life—six decades—alone.

That's just something I can't fathom. I mean, I understand the concept of having a soulmate, someone without whom you can't live. I get it. I'd like to think that I'm lucky enough to have someone like that. But to go fifty or sixty years without anyone else, to basically shut part of your life off because your soulmate is no longer around?

Maybe it's just me, but that just doesn't seem to be right.

Now I can understand how someone can go a few years without another partner; after all, you're still recovering from a sudden loss, and wondering if your heart can ever open that much again. But I'd like to think that everyone has it in them, once they've begun to heal, to find someone else. That person may not be your first soulmate, but who's to say they can't be your second? Life, at least to me, seems to be better when you have someone with whom to share it. And to shut yourself off to that after just a few months or a few years, just because your partner is no longer around...

I dunno. Maybe I'm weird that way. But it just seems sad to me.

I've made Loraine jokingly promise that if I get gunned down in a mass shooting she'll find someone else. I'm not planning on getting gunned down in a mass shooting (although these days you never know), but the thought of anyone—especially someone I love—being alone for decades is just too sad of a thought to bear. And it's something that happens more often than you'd think, at least if you notice certain headstones when walking through the cemetery.

(jim@wmqt.com)