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Why, she wondered, did society feel a constant need to fix things that weren’t broken?
Her heart flooded with the urgency of their dwindling existence. She felt the painful truth of her age, of having reached a point where there was far more of life behind her than ahead of her.
“Yes, it has—time for bed!” she said, quickly tidying her thoughts away to a hidden corner of her mind, as if she had been caught reading someone else’s diary.
she felt the collective warmth of her hand enveloped in his, two hands that had together grown swollen at the knuckles and pigmented by the freckles of age, yet remained the perfect fit.
She thought of what she had said to Rose—trust your instinct, it’s got you this far—and yet she never allowed herself the same advice.
Usually she would spend the day focused entirely on getting through it, quietly enduring her own personal grief which never lessened with the passing of time as she had once been told it would.
Clothes had a way of capturing a moment in time and staying frozen there forever while their owner ripened, changed.
To want something, she realized, was to make yourself vulnerable to losing it.
She was wide awake in an instant, overcome by a prickling awareness that she shouldn’t be listening, and an inability to stop.
“Well, I know that you can’t have one without the other,” he said, “and we’ll only be grieving for something which has been our greatest joy.”
With each day that passed, she felt heavier with the weight of carrying two hearts.
She had once read somewhere that the tragedy of monogamy was that you never fell in love again, but how wrong it was. Over the years, she had fallen in love with Bernard over and over and over.
“It’s not a bad thing, you know, that you’re changing. New experiences change us all, and while it can slow down with age, it never stops . . . I’m seventy-seven and I’m still changing. We are, after all, just a sum total of all of our experiences, walking around in a pair of shoes . . .”
“I’m no expert and I certainly haven’t done everything right over the years, but the strongest couples I know have grown together, supporting their partner’s changes rather than harnessing or fearing them.
She would never be able to comprehend the strange borrowed time that you experience before bad news hits; the minutes, hours, sometimes days where you reside in a bubble of ignorance, a place where small things still matter, before it is pierced by the needle of perspective.
Somehow, without being able to pinpoint a specific moment, he had grown old.
“We could all live in fear of the worst-case scenario, but it wouldn’t be a lot of fun . . .” She fell silent, searching for a way around his words. “Try to be led by hope, rather than fear,”
It was a surreal picture and she felt nostalgic as she watched on, as if she were looking back on the moment as a memory, even while it was happening.
The morning rush was a thousand conversations which hung like a cloud in the roof of the station, melding together to form an indecipherable hum.
“Over the years you will both inevitably change but you will always have one thing in common, and that is that you’re both only human, so try to be kind.”
“To say that I’ve made a few mistakes in my marriage is an understatement, but what I have learned is that sometimes it is our mistakes, our greatest failings, that are the real tests—opportunities to get to know each other better, to put the word love into practice, to watch everything break into a thousand pieces and to glue it back together again.”
