Tag: Marriage

OFF I GO

Gone to Prague, don’t know when I’ll be back

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This blog was like a suddenly abandoned house. I know the owner well — we met in New York City soon after arriving as immigrants to America. He wrote about it HERE.

As co-administrator, I logged right into his blog and saw this note scrawled on one of the private posts:

Text only

 

Prague, I remembered, was the city he and his wife loved the most in their travels throughout North America, Europe and Australia during their thirty years together.

1993
Susan on the Charles Bridge
1993
Bill mingling with tourists
1993
On the streets of Prague

He would be going there alone this time. He was pretty much inconsolable after Susan’s death. He wrote several posts about it, one in the form of a poem HERE. And most recently HERE.

There was a large dose of guilt mixed with grief in his bereavement. “We had our differences,” he told me more than once about his relationship with Susan.

”It was a rocky marriage; we were apart some of the time,” he said, “but even when we weren’t together, we always kept in touch, every day, and I do believe we never stopped loving each other. I know I didn’t.”

I know for one that he was a good caregiver to her in the last three years of her life, and even he agreed with that. He told me that when he apologized to Susan for not always “treating her right,” she said to him: “You know what you call that, honey? Thirty years of marriage.”

That about summed it up, and that should have satisfied him, but the guy kept—and keeps, apparently—beating himself up over it. Maybe going to Prague will help, but I doubt it.

In any case, I’ll be filling in for him on American Daze Purple Haze until further notice.

— Guglielmo Michelini

Nessun Dorma

Soul mate and saviour

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I’ll try and say this in one ‘obituary-like’ sentence (as J.D. Salinger might have written, in fact, did write, about Seymour Glass):

Guido Michelini, that irresponsible womanizing jackass who shows up on this blog from time to time, is the ghost of my former self who came to his senses when his/my son committed suicide at twenty-three, and the person who got me through that hell, in fact saved my own worthless life, was one of the players, as was I, in the drugged-up, gin-swilling sex-o-rama of the 1970s, and who some time later became my wife and continued to keep me sane and gave me a reason to live, until her own death last year, just before Christmas, which, as I’ve written, was for the most part my death too.

Unconditional love

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The great thing about S. was that she loved the bum no matter what.

CABIN IN NEW HAMPSHIRE
He sometimes didn’t treat her as well as he should have (moods, stress, personal problems, and so forth), and even when they were apart for periods of times over the years, as when he rented a cabin in northern New Hampshire after the death of his son and lived there alone for many months, they’d talk on the phone every day and she was understanding and continued to stick by him (she flew up to Boston one holiday weekend and he picked her up at the airport and they drove three hours to the cabin).
And she never cared what he looked like, always accepted him as he was. She got him through all the bad times — hell, before S., he had a girlfriend in California who got so mad at him she threw his suitcase off the balcony of her sixth floor apartment — it busted wide open when it hit the ground, clothes went flying; another girlfriend before S. broke up with him on a bitterly cold New Years Eve outside Bloomingdales department store; and so on and so forth. But not S., never S.
ROCK STEADY
The foundation of their relationship was built on rock, unlike the relationship with the California girl that was built on sand, and the relationship with the Bloomie’s girl that was built on quicksand.
His one consolation after S. died was that he had looked after her during the last few years. She went through hell, four long stays in hospitals and nursing homes. He would help her shower, dress, walk, provide the meals, many other things to do with day-to-day living. He was a good caregiver, like his brother was to his own wife for several years when she came close to death a couple of times.
A few weeks before S. was taken to the hospital for the last time she said to him, I am so lucky to have you look after me, you’ve been good to me. And he said, And I’ll do it until the day I die. Being six years older he believed he would go first. But it wasn’t to be.
HER WARM HAND
At the end, when she was on life support, he held her still-warm hand in his and talked to her about the good times, their visit to Australia and Europe and so many other wonderful times, and it’s possible, he was told, that she could hear him; and then her hand fell from his… the nurse removed the breathing tube…
It’s been a bad day, like all the days since she died, and now he goes to bed after several beers, rum, wine, brandy, and finally, Xanax.