I don’t grieve the way you might expect. I lost Jeffrey twice — once at nineteen, and once at sixty — but I also got him back, at the very end, long enough to learn that the great sorrow of my life had been a great love all along, running underneath everything, unsent but never untrue. I spent forty years thinking I’d been abandoned by a boy who chose someone else. I know now I was loved by a boy who gave me up to save me, and got it wrong, and never stopped, and told me before he died. Most people who lose a love never get that. I did.
Here’s what I learned, holding forty-one unsent letters on a hospital chair.
Sometimes the person who leaves loves you more than the person who stays. Jeffrey walked away not because he didn’t want me, but because he wanted my whole life for me more than he wanted himself in it. He was wrong — I’d have chosen five years with him over fifty without, and I’ll wonder forever what we lost. But he wasn’t careless with my heart. He was trying to protect it, at the cost of his own, and he carried the weight of that choice, and me, every single year, in a box he never let anyone open. That’s not abandonment. That’s the most painful kind of love there is.
