Once in a Hundred Lifetimes

Leslie C. Hill

Falling in love is the easy part. It was love at first sight—just about. Well it would have been if he spoke to me that first evening, but that didn’t happen for two more nights. When you spend your teens and most of your twenties chasing people, being chased, and getting hurt, older women will tell you something: When you fall in love with the right person, it’s easy. “You’ll know,” they’ll say with a smile. “You’ll just know that is HOW you know.” The second night I saw him I stayed over. The third night I ran into him I fell hard. The fourth night I saw him laughing with friends and I thought to myself, “There you are! There you ARE. What took you so long?” not out of frustration, but with wonder. But my chosen love took his time to come around. He was tying up some loose ends, coming out of a long and very deep relationship, sowing some oats, as they say. But right from the start there was no doubt we were something really special. Our first real date was a weekend of laughter and dancing at a gay wedding in Provincetown. Friends still love to recall to me what it was like to witness the two of us falling in love.

Eventually we settled in together for good. Weeks, months, and years went by and over time he became the parents I always needed, the children I never had, the siblings that would never let me down, the best friend of my dreams, as well as a fun, solid, honest, and beautiful partner. I don’t know if that’s how it’s meant to be but that’s what it was like. You can do a lifetime of growing when you are loved like that. With that much love I blossomed and I became someone I had always wanted to be. And my love nurtured him too—we both grew into people we were immensely proud of.

We even grew to love spring, a season we had both hated. Our favorite day became the day we would go to the local botanical gardens to pick annuals for our garden. We made a home people wanted to visit. We had a legendary porch. We used to go out to the curb and just stand and look at our home—just beaming. When people came over, no matter how cozy I made the house, everyone would pile into the hot and crowded kitchen to be with Jeff. He had a magnetic personality, though he did not love socializing nearly as much as I did. He was very affectionate—often grabbing my friends into almost headlocks and kissing their hair or their necks or faces. His dad taught him that. I remember once we met an old friend of mine in town on a cold day and when she said her hands were freezing he offered she could stick her mittened hands in his armpits and she laughed—but she did it. I have met thousands of people by now I am sure, and have loved many of them but Jeff was unique: that one, rare, love.

Fifteen years later when we are closer than any two people could ever be, when we had kissed more than a million times, he gets this pesky pain. Gall bladder, we said.  We find out he has tumors. Three in the liver and one in the pancreas. “What is the pancreas, again? I forget,” I said. He told me quickly, and on the way to the car—“Alex Trebek, Patrick Swayze, and Steve Jobs.” We drove home stunned. Then we held onto each other crying until it came close to causing bodily harm. If they can’t physically separate us—they can’t take one of us. That night, I will never forget, he cried at the kitchen table repeating, I don’t want to go, I wanna stay with you. It turns out the tumors in the liver were benign so pancreatic stage 1 it was. In the face of this, we felt fortunate, but nothing was ever the same. I can see the change in my many photographs. . . . Gone were the carefree smiles.

It is the spring of 2020. He begins cancer treatment—right at the start of the pandemic. I drop him off at the hospital with a carry-on bag, like it was his first day of school. Like a drop off at the airport. I snapped a sorry photo. He will become the fucking champion of all champions and we will learn to fight like no one should ever have to. Love—love will win every moment of every day, and still, we learn a deeper and more complete love of one another.

He does amazing, because he is amazing. He beats it! He beats it! He is cancer free in the winter of 2021. He tries to slowly rebuild and we try to get back to normal. He knows it’s coming back but how long do we have? We try to be happy and we try to be grateful and we don’t slow down—now is not the time. We finally make it to California. We go to Vermont, Massachusetts, the Hamptons, surely other places? It comes back just before the spring of 2022, his doctor calls on the evening of his birthday. Things don’t look good now, it’s spread to the lungs and chemo is our only option.

A few months later chemo doesn’t seem to be working and he is getting weaker and everything is problematic this time. He loses all his hair—he didn’t lose it before. He isn’t strong anymore, like the first time around.  But nothing deters him. We have a July wedding—the most beautiful day of my life. It was a gorgeous, sunny day with blue skies. All of our friends old and new gathered in the front yard of a place we love more than anything. A friend posts on social media, “Love happened here today.” A friend plays a nontraditional wedding march of “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young on the harp. A few months later, against all odds, we get him out of the hospital and go on a two-week honeymoon to Italy—a road trip. Rome, Amalfi, some crap town up in the mountains, Montepulciano, Bologna, Pisa, Sienna, and back to Rome. He drives almost the whole way, his kidneys already failing. He tells his mom this trip changed him. The trip of a lifetime, he says. He can’t believe his eyes! When he sleeps he looks like he is dying. I am scared shitless. I am scared to be there and I am scared to come back. I can’t decide which place I am more afraid of. We come home November 7 and one month later we begin hospice in our beloved home. He says, “But I feel fine—I don’t feel like I’m dying.”

I suffer under the weight and trauma of having to, in my imagination, teach him to die. I am barely making it through the scheduling of friend visits, the constant care, the attempts to cheer, my job, the thought of losing Jeff, the fear of losing myself and this golden life we have created. No one has to be taught to die, it turns out—your body takes care of everything. I will tell him, in an effort to make dying at fucking forty-five seem okay . . . in the quiet, on our porch, “you really lived a full life. Look at all you’ve done. We have done more in our forty-something years than most people will ever do in their whole long lives. You’ve made an incredible difference. All we can hope for is to make an improvement in even one life. . . . Think of how many people you’ve made smile.” I also tried, “You won’t be missing out. There’s nothing good happening after you are gone anyway. Maybe when you go . . .  it’ll only feel like minutes until I join you . . . maybe time is different.”

I text a friend from high school who I don’t even know anymore and I tell her I need her and she gets on a plane and she comes. The day before he dies is the worst day of my life hands down but she’s here, a safe place. He wakes up crying for the first time in days and says, “I don’t want to go.”

I am not one for magical thinking, no religion at all, but I honestly thought we were so close that we would somehow beat death. That, in some way, we would at least still be able to communicate. I knew I was not prepared and I was not prepared. I miss telling him everything, I miss looking at his beautiful face. I miss laughing together about everything. I miss the feeling of holding his beautifully arched feet in my hands. I miss touching the soft skin behind his knees. I miss the fleshy bits of his ear lobes that I promised many times I would eat first if our plane went down in the tundra. I miss every freckle—one shaped like a star. All the songs I made up to calm him and send him to sleep echo around the void in my heart, and nothing even smells like him anymore.

I keep finding little notes around the house where he scrawled “once in a hundred lifetimes,” which was a line he seemed to really want to get right for his vows. “Thank you for giving me a chance to share this life which we call once in a lifetime love but we both know it’s a once in a hundred lifetimes.”

Falling in love was the easy part.