It has been many years since my only diary on Daily Kos. Inspired by
Dave in Northridge today, I decided it was time to post another one.
The image is of the full moon over the place where just this past September I deposited the ashes -- the "cremains," as the official designation goes -- of my partner of 49 years and 8 months and my spouse of ten days. We were married on 9 March 2013 and he made his departure on 20 March.
My reason for posting is not to ask for comfort or advice or virtual hugs, but simply to fulfill a need I have: to tell the story of how magnificently I have been loved and to pay tribute to the beautiful soul who loved me.
The orange symbol of many names now reminds me of those ashes swirling in the river below me on their way to the Thames. Follow me over that symbol if you want to know more.
Our intention was to get married on our 50th anniversary, which would have been 8 July 2013, but Jay's cancer (prostate, with metastasis to the bone) had other ideas. In January he was placed on the third of three drug trials, and it seemed to have a lot of promise, but his discomfort became so great that he decided a month later to go off the trial, and our visiting nurses became hospice nurses.
The title of the diary is a translation from German: Liebe, Tod und Vollmondnaechte; a cycle of Japanese poems recast in German by the poet Manfred Hausmann (1898-1986). Six of them were in turn set to music by organist and composer Matthias Kern from Hannover, who made them available to me to give their US premier on my debut recital in 1974.
That debut recital was underwritten by my own Jay as just one of many similar favors he indulged me in over almost 50 years.
A year later we took our first trip to Europe together, and at a village in England (that I will not name here for now) we took a walk one evening down the High Street to the bridge over the little river. It was a glorious September evening, and we were enjoying the melody of the water running over the weirs beneath our feet. When we looked up to the steeple of the nearby church, we were stunned and awed to see a full moon, perched right on its tip!
That image always stuck with us over the years, and a few weeks before Jay died I told him I planned to take his ashes to our village at the time of full moon. "That will be nice," he said.
I checked the calendar for full moon in September this year, and it was going to be on the 19th, so I booked a flight for myself and one of my nephews, who, with a friend who is living in London because he had to move there to be with his own beloved (before SCOTUS stepped in to do the right thing), joined me at the river. He took the picture up there.
There were actually three nights in a row when the moon was essentially full, and on the third night my nephew and I were in Paris on the way to Germany. There we saw the full moon perched on the I.M. Pei pyramid at the Louvre.
Back home I was looking at the series of pictures of those three nights, and after having been in Germany for ten days I found myself translating: Vollmondnaechte. Full moon nights. And I said -- wait a minute. Wasn't that in the song cycle I did nearly 40 years ago? At three in the morning I couldn't wait, and I went to my music cabinet where I found the score that hasn't seen daylight in decades. And sure enough, there was that title!
I read through the text of the first song, which goes something like this in English:
Shimmering moonlight. And still never a step in the garden
A wall of clouds darkens above. Soon it will rain.
And still never a step in the garden.
Again I languish alone.
The synchronicities just piled on one another -- from that cycle, whose performance was enabled by my lover, we moved to the iconic full-moon moment of our whole lifetime of love, and finally it all came together with Jay's death.
There is lots more to tell, of course, but you'll have to wait until I finish my memoirs.