21 years ago, this week, I began a rather torrid love affair with a woman I’d known for many years but who suddenly expressed an interest.
I was in a very lonely place—having been rejected by two lovers in the preceding 6 months (at least that was my take on things—reality was more complex than that), and very curious about why this person could possibly be interested.
What started out, for me, as a fling, became something far more complicated than I could have imagined, but it was also very instructive. Indeed, it changed my life.
It turned out that she had been abandoned by her partner of some years because she had developed some pretty severe health problems for which the doctors could find no easy answers. Her partner had started law school and determined that she couldn’t take care of a sick person on top of her studies—so just left.
By the time I found all this out, however, I was already involved. I was so insecure then that flattery could literally get a person anywhere with me, and this woman was a consummate flatterer—although I later found out that she actually meant much of what she said to get me into the sack (which, retrospectively, redeems her manipulations a little).
Getting me into the proverbial sack was just the beginning, however. Unbeknownst to me, and maybe even to her conscious awareness, she was dying. All she knew was that she suffered badly and couldn’t manage her own life. Gradually, over the ensuing 9 months, I was introduced to the true horrors she was facing.
The symptoms presented as rapid onset debilitating migraines that could come on at almost any time. They would sometimes be accompanied by seizures. She could be fine for days, even a week, and then suddenly, she would be laid low with these massive headaches which caused her to vomit and pass out.
She had been rendered unable to work, and her ability to make her own living had always been a point of pride for her. Doctors did test after test to try to figure out what was causing her symptoms.
Finally, after yet another MRI—this time from a different angle, a specialist noticed something deep in an important part of her brain (I’m not savvy enough to remember where it was)—a lesion. He asked her if she had ever had an event where she was deprived of oxygen—because, apparently, such events can leave brain injuries that result in lesions like this (I mean who knew?—that’s just what he told her).
At the time, she acted like she couldn’t remember anything—but about a week after his inquiry, she sat down with me and told me the following.
She pointed out a framed watercolor painting that was on her wall. I hadn’t paid much attention to it. It was a simple, though well done, depiction of a pool of water in a clearing, surrounded by trees. When I looked at it again, at her insistence, I noticed it was unfinished. It was also unsigned.
“I started that picture when I was 16,” she told me. “There was this little wooded area behind the high school, [this was in Oklahoma City, OK] and I would skip class to spend time there—away from family and my step mother [who was reportedly a monster ]. We were going to be moving soon, so I wanted to paint the clearing to remember it.”
She said that she had gone back to that wooded area several times in order to complete the picture. But, one time, the last time, some guy who had been watching her movements, was waiting for her.
She only described to me the basics of what he did, how he beat her, trapped her there for hours raping her repeatedly, and then how he tried to strangle her. She did lose consciousness, and when she woke up, found herself in a shallow grave—a hollow he’d scraped out and thinking she was dead, had covered over with leaves and dirt.
She pulled herself out of the grave and was able to find most of her clothing where he’d scattered it and made her way home somehow. Despite her obvious bruised, bloodied and dirty condition, because she was late getting home, her stepmother yelled at her and confined her to her bedroom. She escaped out the window, and went to a friend’s house, who took her to the hospital.
“I went back to the clearing a couple of weeks later,” she said, “in order to see if I could find the picture, and I did—back in some bushes where he’d thrown it.” I looked more closely at the picture and could see that it was smudged with dirt and some blood—but no fingerprints.
“I guess that’s the situation with the lack of oxygen they’re talking about,” she went on, “but I just can’t go there, I just can’t relive that for everyone.”
And I knew what she meant. Her therapist would want to know about this obvious trauma that was now causing so much distress, and maybe even, down the line, there would be law enforcement—at least that’s what she was afraid of.
According to her account, she never painted again, and lived with this framed, unfinished picture as her witness to the horror she never talked about (I’m one of two people who know the story).
She never recovered from her condition. What medication they could find to relieve her symptoms temporarily, directly worked against her bi-polar meds, so she had the choice of being relatively pain free or not cycling. It was a nightmare and in the time I knew her, she tried to kill herself at least three times (that I now remember). What had started out as an affair became a death watch—although I didn’t know it at the time.
In the end, between her seizures and the unhinged attempts at medicating her, she died of a stroke almost 9 months to the day that we got together. I found her—maybe 20 minutes late, largely because I suddenly got the message during meditation (we had separate apartments in the same building) that I needed to check on her. I think she waited until she was safely out of body and then came looking for me.
The apartment was utterly silent, her cat Zack sat at the foot of her bed staring up at her, and she was gone. It was 10 days before Christmas and that night, after she’d been taken away and her family had already come and ransacked her place, the timed Christmas lights on her porch came on and blinked away as if nothing had happened.
All of it, the affair, 9 months of tumult, her death, was devastating. How her family treated me is yet another story, but no one could deny that I was the one who had remained, who had been present.
Now at this remove, I know what she gave me: the joy of genuinely enjoying sex without shame, to play [when she was feeling well she was simply delightful—one of the funniest, most loving human beings I’ve ever known], to relish the little things, like good food, books, cats, thunderstorms and good jazz. To embrace creativity and whatever your own “eccentricities” might be [she was a Taurus and had a few of those].
I taught her a couple Sufi prayers, which she would recite when she was afraid, and occasionally she accompanied me to healing circles. She always accepted gratefully what comfort I gave her.
Toward the end, she told me on one her last remaining good days that she knew I’d loved her best because I hadn’t abandoned her at her worst.
Hadn’t thought about all this in a long while, but I guess that’s another good lesson for me. I need to remember her gifts and what I was able to do for her. I can do that, I can be there and hold something like this. And I don’t regret anything.
P.S. The person that I am did lots of research and found out who I think her attacker was—he’s currently in prison serving several life sentences for similar rape/murders. That’s two of those assholes who’ve touched my life. Done with it.
Comments