Losing You Twice

[Joe Gensle]

This avowed bachelor of 33, successful in high-ticket advertising sales for a major publication, was stopped cold in my tracks by a woman with sepia hair, black-brown eyes, and a knockout body. That her personality sparkled and she, too, was very successful in business completed a package of insatiable desire.

 

I surrendered that bachelorhood, proposing to her on the cliff at Stanford-by-the-Sea, asking Cathy to marry me, telling her if she said ‘No,’ I’d crawl backwards on my knees to the edge of that cliff and take a different kind of plunge. 

Some of her internal demons were so insurmountable that even psychiatric and marital counseling couldn’t alter a course that would lead to our marriage’s early demise,  accelerated by her 15-year old daughter’s launch of buckets of gasoline toward me and her mother’s lost attention at every spark of  disagreement under our roof.

 

But my vows were sacrosanct and I lived, ate, and breathed the principle that, “Love is a behavior.”

 

Being the second time I lost you, I’ve relived what I told you “…until death us do part,” and “I love you for forever,”  and you now know I successfully kept those promises but I didn't know success could  hurt so deeply, Cathy.