29 Jul LOVED AND LOST

By Sarah Cooper-Ellis

A phantom lives forever in our love, the great sorrow embodied there. 

The saying goes: “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Is it? How deeply do you want to let love into every fiber of your muscles, given how much you will ache at the end?

Living now on the flip side, where love’s object has vanished, I resist the sorrow welling within, aching through my throat when it spills, wracking my entire being. I hate it! But, resisted, its weight suffocates. I drag it around, my steps staggering, dimly aware.

So I turn on the music. I hear an aching phrase of Handel—on a violin in a minor key. It evokes sadness, generally, for life’s plaintive side. But soon, the mezzo-soprano’s line, the note sustained across harmonic changes, bending the back of the sadness, brings the unmistakable flavor. I’ve lost him.

I look at the photos that live compressed in computer files. I want to extract these selfies—the two of us, beaming our happiness together. They should be living here in this room with me. My smile—this is worth it! This is what life was meant for! This joy! 

I’m left with broken threads and tatters to be restitched, somehow. 

What do I do with these wounds that seem to define me? Where do I take my broken heart for mending? 

When I think I’m about to make those high-pitched screechings that I seem to have invented for this particular grief, like a signature sound, I close the windows to protect the ears of my neighbors, especially the children. Should they have to hear this? 

One of the children, I realize, often cries in the backyard. I imagine that his parents understand he needs to. So perhaps we are all even, somehow, somewhere.

Putney native Sarah Cooper-Ellis published her first novel, Landing, in December 2019, shortly before the pandemic struck. The semi-autobiographical novel was based on her late-life love affair and marriage to woodworker and mathematician Abijah Reed, who died on April 9 of this year. Cooper-Ellis lives in Putney with her border collie and is currently working on a memoir of her husband’s decline and death from ALS. Her essays have appeared in The Commons and Write Angles Journal.

Read more from Sarah’s on her blog
https://scooperellis.com/my-blog