Memory is the Mysterious PoWer

It is care that also keeps bright the memory of yesterday's desires. Memory is the Mysterious power to resurrect in October a desire that died in April. A memory is a living thing, it blends what was with what is now. And when the winds of desire are not strong enough to "twirl one red leaf", memory sweetens what is with the scent of what used to be. And committed love says "Thanks for the memory". Let me tell you of the true loves of Eric Zorg-of his desiring love and his committed love. It will make everything clear.

Eric loved his wife, Karen, for fifteen years in an idyll of yeasty desire.

Let is be said in honesty that jealousy sometimes played bad tricks on them in the darker nooks of their Eros. Still, it is true that Eric felt the flow of his desire moving like a white water rapid toward Karen alone, toward all she embodied in the flexuous tautness of her flesh and all she ensouled in the breezy freedom of her spirit.

They love each other well.

But five years ago Karen's springhtly sexuality was slackened a step by a nettlesome lapse in memory, mostly a forgetting of names, then dates, and then slowly of things so near and precious to her that, in her bright interludes, she knew something was happening to her that she wanted, above all, not to happen.

Early on, before Alzheimer's disease occupied the heartland of her life, she still was able to offer an occasional seductive promise to Eric. And she still did her first mate's chores on their thirty-five-footer, her fumbling with the gear only making her salty grit the more precious in his eyes, while they skimmed the lazy Pacific swells from Catalina Island back to Marina Del Rey. But that was more than four years ago, when weekends on the ocean felt like an hour spent too soon.

Now every hour is a shadowed day.

Karen's once vital body and luminous spirit no longer signal to Eric that he is of all men most favored. She does not talk anymore; Eric calls her Karen, but the name is a scratch of sound to her now, and she makes no answer to it.

Eric maneuvers small spoonfuls of bland mush into her mouth several times each day, playing gentle tricks on her mouth to get the food inside, only to have her spit half of it, half munched, on her baby bib. He cleans her diapers and wakes often during the night to cover her shoulders with the blanket she has tossed off in her fidgety sleep. Does she dream? Does she know Eric is there? That he who is there is Eric? She cannot tell.

He has moved his office into his house, and works out of it there now, nagging and nursing his insurance accounts while keeping one eye on Karen, in case she is seized by one of her sudden, strange urges to wander, sometimes far, where no one knows her, outside the house. His friends tell him he should put Karen in an institution.

What is there in the fabric of this man, this ordinary man who still has the same deep desires all ordinary men have, what is there that binds him to the side of this mockery of the woman who promised once that she would satisfy his desires forever?

He has so much right to happiness as any other man. Why does he not shuffle her off to professional custodians, and seek a new love to meet his unslaked desires? What compels him to stay with Karen in the dawnless darkness of her soul's lingering night?

Committed love, and only that, is what keeps Eric at her side. He cares for Karen.

She calls out a need she cannot speak and he answers back with a care he cannot explain. Care, love's survivor of desires that died with a shinning yesterday, is the miracle behind Eric's caring presence in his darker today.

Desire is spent. There is nothing of her he desires. How could he desire this stranger, this mewling infant who spits up on her pillow? It is care for a restless body whose irrational spirit seems sometimes to mock him like a demon chorting over a lost soul.

It is care that keeps respect for her.

He respects the God-like being hidden somewhere inside this frail mindless form of a woman to whom he once said those most daring words: I will be there with you. He cannot see her real self, feel he'd magic, or hear her music anymore. He just believes that she is there, ravaged but not destroyed by the Alzheimer syndrome.

And it is with care that he remembers her.

What he remembers is alive as the love that fulfilled hi past. Who she was dances with what she is now. His life with the real Karen is not dead. It is alive in the flitting images on the screen of his remembrance. His memory gives him a savory after-taste of what he once desired and she once gave him.

There is cynics who say that Eric only does what he does because he knows he will be miserable still if he does anything else; he is only choosing the lesser of two miseries. Nothing heroic about that. Maybe so. And it is true that he sometimes rages in his soul's dark room, stifling complaints to a silent God too long gone on leave of absence, muffling a wish he dares not utter, a prayer for Karen to die.

Committed love is seldom pure; we will not have it without a tangle of conflicting cries, without muttering our muffled complaints. It is always alloyed with the coarser stuff of unsatisfied desires. But even compromised, it is the secret power for sticking with what we are stuck with when the fun has gone out of it and we know that sorrow may stay to the end.

What I've said in this chapter is simple, elemental, and a foundational for everything else that is still to be said. Commitment is a way of loving as the fire of desire slowly burns down, and we feel a little cheated because the best thing we have ever wanted is passing away. But caring is commitment's way of loving, not getting what someone promises us, but giving what someone needs. And when respect and good memories are added to care, we have the makings of enduring love. The makings of a love that lasts and more, a love that makes life enduringly beautiful.

Any thought?

Let's have a coffee

Hari

Enjoy reading...Blessing