Intimacy

It's 3 1/2 years now since Wendy died. I miss her presence as much as ever, sometimes more so. I can't count the ways I miss her, but I was reminded of one way today. Occasionally we used to indulge in scurrilous gossipy remarks about people we knew, people in our family, or our friends, acquaintances and neighbours. These remarks would be about conversations, or observations, or events, or sometimes all. We would never have dared to say to their faces any of the remarks we made to each other about family members, friends or neighbours, but it was one of the minor pleasures of life to be able to say these things to each other, secure in the certainty that what we said would go no further. I had an experience today that falls in this category and a fleeting thought, "I must share this with Wendy!" Then reality set in, Wendy's not here now to share this priceless gem. On reflection, our scurrilous conversations, brief though they always were, rank high on the scale of things that made our marriage so pleasurable, catty comments. They might have ranked in the top 5 pleasures of our marriage.  Sometimes this was pillow talk, sometimes it gave us a brief talking point as we did the dishes or the weekly hunt and gather expedition to our friendly neighbourhood supermarket. It was just one kind of intimacy between us, part of the bonding process perhaps, and it was immensely pleasurable. I miss those occasional conversations and it saddens me that there is no one now with whom I can share the sort of unkind, scurrilous, scandalous comments I'm describing. If I believed in an afterlife I'd be jotting down notes to remind myself of some observations, some episodes I'd relish talking about with Wendy when we meet again in the hereafter. But I know, of course, there is no such thing as an afterlife, so there's not much point in making notes. These aren't items of note that I want to record for posterity in my memoirs.

It's a benchmark of true intimacy that we were able to have these totally uninhibited conversations in which nothing, absolutely nothing was off limits. We were lucky I suppose that we fell into this custom quite by accident very early in our married life together. We lost the ability to have these intimate dialogues during that two-year stormy period I described in another chapter of these memoirs (see post of June 28, 2013). Thank goodness we recovered it, and recovered or discovered so much else besides, that enabled us to forge unbreakable bonds that united us for well over fifty years. Probably it's this aspect of intimate bonding that enables a loving couple to withstand or shrug off many of the stresses and strains that lead to the break up of less secure unions. 

Wendy's birthday, October 14, 2001