Journeying in Two Directions

This journey I'm on often seems to go both forward and backward. I have to live my life, and adjust to my new normal. But I also look back, savoring the memories and finding surprisingly many things to be grateful for.

I still say "we." I worry that people will find it tiresome, but often it slips out before I can make the correction. I don't know if I should try consciously to break this habit, or whether it will work itself out over time. I don't want to pretend that "we" never existed; I don't want what I had with Philip to be put on a shelf, out of sight. I hate it when people say, "I can't help it," but sometimes, I just can't. Something to work on or at least think about.

I actually think I'm pretty lucky. My marriage, short as it was (12 years is pretty short, compared with many people's marriages) gave me much more than I ever expected. We had a wonderful time together. We had problems, to be sure, but even those taught me a lot about myself and what I'm capable of. Not everyone gets the kind of relationship we had. We had some serious obstacles to overcome before we got married, so I think we were always conscious of how valuable our time together was. We were, as Kurt Vonnegut said in "Mother Night," a nation of two.