You Were So Wonderful I Hate to See You Go

Alone and cold: this is the way I spent New Year’s Eve 2017. A few days earlier my furnace had broken, while the weather turned icy. Temperatures plummeted below freezing. Unfortunately my heating company could not install a new furnace until January 2. My house is midcentury modern, meaning a low-sloped roof over walls of glass, meaning high cedar-beamed ceilings and an open floor plan, meaning bone-chilling without heat. Thanks to space heaters I survived.
By January 3 with the new heater purring, I was cold no longer. Yet very much alone when I headed to Café Kindred for my first Match date of 2018—groan. This was my second bout on Match. My first time around a year earlier, I met and dated a lot, got plenty of material to ruminate and write about, but never found my forever man. This time my Match plan was to cast my net wide and not expect much.

I was sitting in the café’s front table with a steaming latte when he walked in. I got up and went to him. “Are you Dan?” After he ordered coffee, he sat across from me, where we made happy talk about places we love. He told me he had just returned from six weeks in Italy, where he studied the language. His travels came on the heels of his wife’s death. The same impetus, the loss of my husband, sent me to Paris in the summer of ‘16. “I wanted to figure out how to live the rest of my life,” I told Dan, who said that was why he went to Italy.

I was struck by what we had in common. After terrible losses, both of us had gone abroad alone to help heal our grief. A bold brave move motivated by our spouses, who taught us this life is finite. We had to abandon the shallows for deep water.

Nowadays he teases me about what came next: the questions I put to him. But by January 3, 2018, I had been on a jillion of these first meeting coffee dates. I asked him: “How long were you married?” “Was your marriage happy?” “How long was your wife ill?”

Intrusive questions, I admit. Yet he was open about everything.

We talked about that awful first diagnosis, the logistics of caring for a terminally ill spouse, equipment, medical facilities, and doctors. He had his house renovated so his wife could be cared for at home. Caregivers were there for her during the day. After work, he went home, relieved the caregiver, and slept on a pallet near her bed, so he could care for her during the night. We talked about our children and how they had dealt with this great loss.
“Were you faithful to her?” I asked.

What nerve I had in asking this and what little tact. But another Match man I had liked turned out to be a player; I wanted someone I could trust.

Dan’s dark eyebrows rose, but his gaze stayed fixed on me. “Yes,” he said. “I was faithful.”
So we had this in common.

We took a walk to my favorite bookstore, One More Page. We laughed and talked. Before we parted that blustery day, he told me he wanted to see me again. But because of the wide net I had cast, I was booked with Match men until the next week when we met at the National Gallery of Art, my favorite museum. The hours melted away as he showed me his beloved Renaissance Madonnas, and I took him through the impressionists, dwelling on the luscious Monets and Renoirs. A fleeting thought came to me: I could love this man.
Still I was playing the Match game and couldn’t see him until the following week when we went to dinner at Cote d’Or, where we held hands under the table. A few days later I made dinner for him here and he brought me a gorgeous bouquet of flowers from his favorite florist. Thus began his marking our time together with flowers.
We went to plays, dinner, and a concert. Before January melted into February, he asked me to be his valentine. In February when I went out with other people, my mind was on Dan. Early March, he helped me put on a party for friends. This wasn’t easy since we had lost our power for a day due to a storm, but Dan and I managed. He met my son; I met his daughter and granddaughter. The end of the month he helped my son and me put on an Easter dinner for my husband’s family.

By this time both of us were off Match. I had found who I was looking for.

In the summer of ’18, we gloried in everything DC has to offer, art exhibits, a Kennedy Center concert, even a baseball game. In early September we went on a month long holiday in Italy. The first days Dan experienced the jet-lagged Ellen, a difficult drama queen, which we laughed about. How we enjoyed our journey up the Adriatic, its exquisite art, medieval cities, stunning vistas. We spent a week in Venice then took a fast train to Rome, where we got sick.

At first I was sick with flu and Dan went out for food and meds from the farmacia. Then we were both sick and got sicker. We never made it to the Vatican, where we had tickets or to the Farnese Palace. To be sick and far from home brought us closer. Dan took me to an Italian clinic twice, but they were no help. At night my temperature climbed, and my cough deepened, so I couldn’t sleep.

We yearned for home and bought everything recommended to keep us from coughing on the airplane. My fear was that Lufthansa would put me out in Greenland because my coughing got so bad.

How glad we were when we arrived back. I could have kissed the ground at Dulles. Soon we went to the Emergency Room for some wonderful American medicine. We recovered together and looked forward to the day when we were well enough to get flu shots.

We spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with each other and our families. Early on New Year’s Eve I watched Dan and his grandson play Hungry-Hungry Hippos beside the Christmas tree. What a difference a year makes.

2018, you were so wonderful I hate to see you go.