LOVED YOU FOR A THOUSAND YEARS

 

I have loved you for a thousand years...I'll love you for a thousand more (lyrics by Christina Perri) 

Sometimes when you fall in love you win the lottery. Not just the lottery of life, but the lottery that spans lifetimes more than your own. You feel a connection that is more than just meeting someone in this life. I know it's so difficult to describe but it's a vibration that can be felt in every cell. 

When two are one the bliss is complete. And then, one fateful horrid absolutely heart-wrenching black night, one of the two dies. It's like time itself is rent in half. Not unlike a nuclear explosion, it feels as if something elemental in Nature is...wrong. Fate has manipulated life, but badly. A nuclear explosion is a contrived, unnatural occurrence. So is the death of a twinsoul like my husband, Robert. 

When I met him there was an electricity between us that felt like heightened energies melding together. It was as if worlds collided. I have looked back in my own existence and realized that we crossed paths in close proximity during the Montreal Expo of 1967. I was travelling with my best friend and parents. First Montreal, then Bermuda. Rob was stationed at the Expo as a military guard. I had to squeeze past him on my way out of one of the pavilions. I noticed him peripherally but my attention wasn't captured. At some cellular or atavistic level I must have remarked upon his visage because when I met him for real...almost a half century later, there was an instant recognition. 

His face was different. His body was different. And yet...there was something that tugged and niggled at my subconscious. Eventually the truth came out but we really didn't pay attention to our past. We were too busy paying attention to our present. Or, at least, I was. He was less drawn to me at first, than I was drawn to him. For me, he was magic. I couldn't put my finger on what, exactly, about him was so magnetic. Certainly his intelligence was a prime factor. His conversations were always informative, not just humorous at times. I learned something useful whenever talking to him and I was frequently entertained by his many stories of military life. Vietnam. Angola, Bosnia. There were others. 

Since I knew little of mechanics and engineering, those types of stories also really attracted me. How could one person just know so much about almost everything? (Luckily, there were a couple of areas where he was a self-described noob. Partners, couples, married people. He could never pick out who belonged with whom, in a crowd. Whatever criteria his mind was using to match up people, actually never worked in real life! He was always wrong.) Another area of weakness for him was reading body language. He was the absolute worst at that. He was kind of like Sheldon Cooper in that respect. 

I always felt like I had known him for aeons, not just for sixteen years. For his part, he never really said the same to me but one thing that Bob always loved was the concept of time travel. We would often play the time travel game whereby one of us would ask the other, "If you could travel back in time, where would you go?" When I replied, "Expo 67" he was extremely surprised! His answers mostly concerned wars in history such as WWII. My answers were often back to Egyptian eras or Ancient Greece. So fun to discuss the "what ifs" with my Robert. 

He was my stars. He was my everything. He was my present and, it felt like, my past. My long-ago past. He said his dad told him he had an 'old soul' and should have been living during the wartime years. His dad was correct; Bob does have an old soul but much, much older than his father had considered. 

I have loved you for a thousand years...I'll love you for a thousand more. In spiritual truth we have been together in many lifetimes. I can't wait to be together with him in the next life and so I try to live my life as focused on eternity as I can possibly be. Do you think of reconnecting with your loved one in eternity as well, or is it just me? 

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About the Author
I lost my husband in January 2015. He was my stars. He was my everything. I write memories to help me deal with grief--a grief I was not prepared to face. I never would have been ready to say "Goodbye" but I also never would have gauged the depth of grief to be so deep. I hope my poems can help others realize they are not alone in the loss of a beloved family member.
I'm Grieving, Now What?