The Loves of My Life

Love can be warm and wonderful or dark and full of despair. I have experienced both.

I have been in love four times in my life. Or thought I had. Turns out I was really only in love once with my best friend and husband of almost 30 years, Alan.

Marty and I met during the summer we were both 16. He was visiting his cousins who lived three houses up the street from us. We fell deep in puppy love at our first meeting, spent the summer together climbing trees and playing baseball in the street. We vowed to write to each other all winter and reunite next summer, when he visited again from Pennsylvania.

We did spend the next summer together when we were 17. Young and in love with life and each other or so I thought. And then I heard from his brother later that year that Marty had died in a motorcycle accident just before his 18th birthday. He liked to ride without a helmet and that had been his undoing when he was thrown from his bike and hit a telephone pole.

I grieved for Marty for a year or so until I met Chris when I was 20. Chris was from Massachusetts and he visited his friend, Harry, every other weekend. (Apparently, I couldn’t meet anyone from Connecticut) I became fast friends with Harry’s wife, Candy and the four of us spent every other weekend together. Picnics, partying, card games, drinks at the pub, walks, beach days. I adored Chris but he was a free spirit and after a year, he told me that he thought I loved him more than he did me, so he was letting me go. As he walked out the door, he turned and looked at me and said, “I really do love you.” What??? My heart was broken again. (I heard that Chris had died in 2023)

Then came Don, the bad boy. My parents didn’t like him which just made him all the more attractive to me. His dad owned a ski resort in Vermont and we spent many weekends up there in the snow. We would drive up on Friday and spend the weekend playing in the Japanese pools, going to the night club and hanging out with the resort staff. After a year of a rather tumultuous relationship, I found out he was cheating on me with a friend of mine, so we were done. Don, me and my friend were all done. I heard years later that he had put a gun in his mouth when he was 30.

Alan came into my life about 4 years later. He came to all my softball games to watch me pitch and cheered me on to two championships over a three year period. We started dating on July 3, 1983. On July 4, he told me he loved me and we got engaged that December and married the following April. It took me a few years to find him but I guess you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the prince. My prince was with me for 30 years before I lost him to Parkinsons’s Disease and dementia at the age of 58. That was 12 years ago and I am done with love. There will never again be another Marty, Chris, Don and certainly not another Alan.

Heaven has been described as a place of hope where you will see all your loved ones again. I hope one day when I enter the Pearly gates that I see them all there playing cards or baseball and having a beer together.