While I come to Dailykos multiple times a day, I more often read political diaries than anything else. But I also enjoy personal diaries. While they are about other people’s lives, they often make me ponder my own. And so, here I am for only my second diary ever, following up on my 7-year-old coming out story, which you can read here if you’re so inclined. I wrote it when I was 70 and hopefully it gave some perspective as to why I, and so many like me, waited until later in life to exit our own closets. If you're interested in reading it, it’s here.
But today’s story is not so much about being gay, although my identity is part of my story. It’s more about the nature of friendship, the quality of persistence in what can be the most trying of circumstances, and the process of grieving after a personal loss.
If you're interested, head below the fold.
In my first diary, I had just started exploring how being openly gay had changed, and continued to change, my life. What did it mean for my future? Would I just continue living my life pretty much as I had been? In spite of the support system that I had in place, how would I deal with my own loneliness? After all, I’d been in my own apartment for over a year, living in a city where I had no deep personal connections. Would I seek out others like me for friendship? Or, at 70, did I want to seek out a partner this late in my life? A lot of questions but, at that time, few answers.
So I first found a group of gay men that gathered together for dinner once a week at one restaurant or another. It was something to do one evening a week, but offered little otherwise. The guys in the group all knew one another and they didn’t go out of their way to welcome someone new; and I had little in common with them aside from my gayness. That wasn’t working for me.
I admit to exploring my sexuality a bit, and I kissed a number of frogs. While I knew this wasn’t going to result in a lasting friendship or relationship, it did relieve my loneliness for an hour or an evening. And at least I learned what I wasn’t looking for in the future. Casual sex was not my thing, and fooling around with married men just felt dirty to me. (No judgement here—it just wasn’t me.)
But after a while, pretty much fed up with that kind of life, I encountered one fellow online who actually seemed to be a nice guy—separated from his wife of 17 years and with a lot of shared experiences. We started seeing each other, and it never felt casual to me. And after a while, it didn’t feel casual to him, either. Long story short, we grew closer as the months went by, until he moved in with me in March of 2016, and we’ve been (mostly) monogamous partners ever since.
At the same time, I was dealing with my wife. We were living about an hour apart, and not only separated, but estranged. She felt betrayed and angry—fully justified feelings. I had told her, in a tearful exchange when I came out, that I still loved her—we’d been best friends for 30 years—and that I wanted us to be a part of each other’s lives in any way she would accept. I am writing freely about this part of my life because she died two years ago —a very important part of my story, but that comes later—so I don’t feel that I’m violating the trust we had.
The next couple of years were rough for both of us. She had been deeply depressed most of her life, sometimes suicidally so. She made a couple of half-hearted attempts to end her life during that time, and each time I was overcome with guilt and overwhelmed trying to keep her not only in THE world, but also in MY world. Eventually, though she was still deeply depressed and would remain so until her death, we grew closer and closer. By the time we divorced in May of 2016, we had once again become best friends. Because we didn’t have children, our divorce was entirely about finances. So we managed our divorce on our own, and split everything 50/50.
She sold her home and moved closer to me (only a couple of miles away). I helped her search for a new home and managed the remodeling for her. And from then on, we were together a part of virtually every day until the day she died.
We had gone on a trip to Ireland and Scotland in September of 2019 (a trip of a lifetime for both of us). But when we returned, she started having increasing problems breathing. By November of that year, her lung capacity was only 33%, and she was definitively diagnosed shorty afterward with bronchiolitis obliterans, which is as awful as it sounds. It’s a rapidly progressive, irreversible, and untreatable pulmonary disease whose outcome is guaranteed. She became sicker and sicker until mid-February of 2020, when she became fully dependent on oxygen 24/7. By early April, she really needed a full-time caregiver, so I moved in with her for the last month of her life, during which she was also getting at-home Hospice care. She passed away at the end of April two years ago, finally in no distress.
I can’t begin to describe my grief; I loved her more deeply than I had ever loved anyone else, and I don’t believe I’ll ever love that deeply again. My grief was compounded by my sense of guilt and regret at the pain I’d caused her. and more recently, I’ve come to regret that we didn’t travel more when we were younger. She had always wanted to, but I was always obsessed with the cost and resisted far too often. I’ve recently started traveling again, and it feels in some ways, like a tribute to her.
I know I'm not alone in any of this, not the coming out late in life nor the sense of overwhelming grief at an intensely personal loss. And I have no words of advice about grieving. We all grieve differently, and as Hospice has taught me, there’s not one right way.
As for coming out late in life, so many of us have hidden ourselves for so long for so many reasons. For anyone looking for support with this, you may find what I did at Empty Closets. Or google 'married gay support’ in your area. You may be as lucky as I was.
Peace.