Lessons Learned
“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains.
The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”
~William Arthur Ward
1921-1994
XXIII
Vera Lenore
July 2025
Never been through this before! Just when you thought you’d seen it all, something enters your life that totally throws you for a loop and you come to realize that, although you’ve gone through so much in your life, there is an unimaginable amount of other things you had no clue were out there just waiting for your arrival.
Some of these occurrences are a welcome reprieve from the day to day…vacations, holidays and celebrations are on the top of the list. Then there are the gut wrenching obstacles that seem to be placed there to trip you up, take you down and drag you into an abyss of sorrow, grief, and displacement. The kind of thing that demands silence and a sacred way of being.
Of course my experiences are unique, as is yours, but there is a common thread that weaves through every life and it is inextricably woven into the fabric of human existence…the inevitable loss of loved ones. Nothing ever prepares you for it. As a child, talk of death and dying were verboten. My mother visibly cringed at the mere mention. We simply lived and learned of death mostly through the demise of elderly grandparents, relatives and pets.
As adults we are subjected to many devastating losses. Our parents are very difficult ones to bear, no matter what age you are when they pass. Of course, losing a mom or dad at a young age has got to be harrowing…a totally different kind of grief. Grief is a very personal, intimate emotion that few have the proficiency to share. There is a standard grieving process that many are familiar with. According to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, in her 1969 book, “On Death and Dying”, there are 5 Stages of Grief one encounters…denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. What many are unaware of is that she was studying the emotional responses of people facing their own death, not those of us who grieve a lost love.
On October 25, 2023 we lost the last of our parents. My father died over twenty years ago and the remaining three parents (my mother and my husband’s parents) all perished in 2023. An agonizing year, to say the least and there was a palpable, inward shift when the last of the parents left. It was my mother-in-law, whom I loved dearly. Because of 2023, I discovered that I have an endless supply of tears, but fate was not done with me yet.
On June 28, 2025 I lost my husband of 43 years and the absolute love of my life. Six months after being diagnosed with cancer, he succumbed. He passed in our bed, painlessly and quietly, as he wanted. It was a surreal moment when I saw him take his last breath. With his departure my heart broke into a million pieces and will never be the same.
We are blessed with three children (two boys and the youngest, a girl). From those three came seven grandchildren who are all beacons of light. His legacy lives on in them.
We met when we were 20, through mutual friends. Our first dance was Stairway To Heaven only because a girl he didn’t like asked him to dance and he told her he’d already promised the dance to me. Imagine my shock when he said that because no such thing was said. So we danced our first dance together, although it would take awhile before we truly connected.
Then there was that time when a bunch of us went to a Little River Band, Heart and Eagles concert in Connecticut. We all got rooms at some seedy hotel so we could get up early and head to the Yale Bowl for some great music. As in all large groups of friends who bring friends, there was a troublemaker amongst us. Once we all arrived Derek went behind the hotel and started disparaging the people who lived in the projects, on the other side of the fence. They called Derek out and he jumped the fence. Our guys also jumped the fence because they just couldn't leave Derek on that side alone. The next thing you know it was like a scene out of West Side Story. My husband, whom I wasn’t dating at the time, found his way to the front, between the rival gangs and told everyone that this doesn’t have to happen. He told all the guys to just put down the wooden fencing they broke off for weapons, and we have a concert to go to. As the project residents were putting down the pickets, one guy picked up a rock and hurled it at the peacemaker who got hit on his upper forehead. Bedlam broke out and the cops were called in. Somehow we girls managed to get the injured to our room and I was his Florence Nightingale, trying to clean and bandage his head wound. It was decided that he should go to the hospital and get checked out so my friends took him but he didn’t want to stay because once they got there, he saw the crowd in the emergency room, so they turned around and came back to the hotel to rest up for the concert the next day…did I mention it was my birthday when all this went down? Yeah…Friday the 13th. The next morning, we had three friends we had to bail out of jail before we could go to the concert. So we pooled our money, got our guys out, and the concert was magnificent!
I was in the Travel and Tourism program at a local, vocational school at the time, and planned to see the world. This guy that I helped out in the bathroom of a seedy hotel kept asking me out and I wanted to keep it strictly “platonic” until I thought, “what harm would one date do?”.
On that date he told me of the future, and his dreams and plans and I felt like I wanted to be part of that. To help him achieve his plans, dreams and goals…and the rest is history.
The depth of grief cannot be expressed in mere words. When your best friend, ally and dearest love departs from this world there is an incomprehensible emptiness, a void that echoes in cavernous memories, photographs and music. I will always treasure the memory of our epic road trip to the Grand Canyon in 2021.
I still see him and hear him in alternate ways these days. A different communication has replaced the standard, earthly form of connection. He lives in me now and in his children and grandchildren as we search for signs and signals of his presence. We feel him in everything and everywhere we go.
Love endures and is the greatest teacher of all time.
Until Next Time…Be Well My Friends