My ex-husband died. He died on 10-10-2020. For numerology purposes that’s a 6, one of the perfect numbers. It’s also part of the triad, the 3 numbers about which someone (Tesla? Ramanujan?) said, if we knew the significance of the numbers 3 6 9 we would be paralyzed with astonishment. His heart just stopped, refused to continue its designated purpose within the human body. There’s not a number for that unless you consider the (one) of its kind belonging to the person it inhabits going to a zero.

I have, since then, been trying to understand some things—unsuccessfully. I’ve played a lot of chess games against the computer. One of the first things we did, he and I, after meeting was to play a game of chess. He won.

The songs come back and play round and round. Simon and Garfunkel…”Hello darkness, my old friend…” And Scarborough Fair…”Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Remember me…for (s)he once was a true love of mine.” And he was then, once. A true love of mine.

I’ve had many miserable nightmarish dreams and a lot of unexpected pain. The dreams that are not such as that, the ones that seem filled with significance and symbols and complexity I can only partially decipher. I do get the sense of them, the sense that there is something incredible just out of reach. The most important things go into that place where there are no words.

But the finality of things, the end here on earth, of our consciousness, our ability to share with one another, that life that we shared so long ago, ended then—long ago. Still I go back there. To our children, those beautiful lovely babies that we had, the places, the rivers of our youth. Now there’s no one there to be able to say, “remember when…?”

We shared things unique to ourselves, our lives, our little family. The life we had together. The cottage on the river where we lived in La Crosse, the coffee shop we owned in Iowa City, the community theatre. We have not spoken for a long time, not directly. Our daughter shared between us, the answered questions, “How’s your dad doing?” “How’s your mom?”

But this is it. It’s over. Though it ended a long time ago. Now it’s no longer possible to continue the conversation.

The Sound of Silence.

Good-bye love