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Lost my soul mate AGAIN after 20 years looking


TheOtherOne

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I apologize, in advance, for the length and incoherence that will undoubtedly follow. This was 25 years in the making. And now, what appeared to be a fairy tale reunion is now over.

I met her when I was about 22. One night after a gig, hanging out with some of the performers. SHE had no business responding to my "hello" as she was simply way to far out of my league. She was in what turned out to be an abusive relationship and was just out for the night to relax. We talked, danced, kissed, said good night and, before I walked away, she gave me her number without me asking for it. Normally, I wouldn't get involved with someone already in a relationship but I simply could not forget her .. Or resist her.

Unfortunately, I met her during the nasty divorce of my parents. My world was upside down as it was as it appeared that I was going to have to choose between my parents, and now she was in it. And, as I would only realize years later, my mother, with whom I ended up living for the next few years, was an incredibly racist and controlling person. And SHE was a fully Americanized, Jewish, Thai, rock and roll, biker chick from hell - or at least she LOOKED like it. SHE also had 2 children ages 5 and 3. My mother absolutely made my life miserable to the point where I started hiding that SHE and I were dating. And for the next 5 years I had my "family" girlfriend that I could bring home and I had SHE. We tried sooo hard to make things work. It was all my fault. SHE would have married me 30 seconds after I ever asked her to - IF I had asked her to. But I wasn't ready to leave the security of what was left of my family never mind actually get married or even just move in together.

So after 5 years, it got to be too much for SHE. SHE found someone else and broke up with me for good. In the early weeks and month after that, I realized what I truly wanted was to be with SHE, said the hell with everything and actually did ask her to marry me. By then, SHE was unexpectedly pregnant. And when I DID ask her to marry me, she thought I was joking and didn't take the proposal seriously. It was only decades later that I found this out when SHE told me that, had she realized that I was serious back then, she would have said YES.

I hit rock bottom after we broke up. 6 months of deep depression and the only thing that I believe saved me was my parents' divorce finalizing and my mother moving to the out of state vacation home full time. I caught SHE and her then bf driving by the house the day that we were packing the moving truck, apparently checking to see if I really was leaving. That was the last I saw or heard from SHE.

With the advent of the internet, I would occasionally look to see if I could find SHE over the course of the next two decades. I never did. Ironically, it was my mother's obituary, that ran in my hometown paper, that caught SHE's eye and SHE left me a message on the obituary guest book page. I couldn't believe it. In the middle of the family grief surrounding my mother's passing, SHE finds ME. I had moved on. Never married. No kids. But spent over 10 years with the same woman. But in the last few years, we weren't happy. And you can see where this is going now, but SHE and I called it 20 years earlier,saying that the only way that either of us would ever have an affair would be if SHE and I broke up and found each other years later.

It took me a month to even summon the courage to send an email. I didn't know if I wanted to open up old, deep wounds, but I also knew that I had to take the opportunity to apologize once and for all for the way that I treated SHE the first time around. I received a reply within a few days, both of us being cautious of each other. We kept to email for another month before moving to telephone conversation. Then it was time to meet face to face. I had held back the things that I NEEDED to say to SHE b/c I needed to apologize and ask her forgiveness in person. Turned out that SHE had forgiven me years ago. It also turned out that SHE had dealt with Round One of ALL leukemia recently and was in full remission for about 6 months before contacting me. We continued communicating. Comparing our lives. Understanding why each of us did and felt the things we did. And we discovered that we were still very much in love with each other. But neither of us could extricate ourselves from our lives easily. So we did what we had to do to see each other for about a year. During that time, we discussed our futures, whether we wanted a future together and what would have to be done to make it happen.

SHE's significant other had made it perfectly clear to her that he had no intentions of ever marrying her. SHE said that they had become roommates and nothing more. I wasn't about to waste a second opportunity to be truly happy with the "one that got away" and started quietly putting events in motion that would allow SHE and I to be together within the next year or so. We talked via phone, text and/or email sometimes multiple times a day. SHE would fill me in on the lives of her three children to the point where I nearly felt like part of the family. I got a phone call in the middle of the night when SHE became a grandmother for the second time at age 43. SHE couldn't have been more proud.

On what turned out to be our last "date", SHE told me that she hadn't been feeling great for a few days and said that it had an ominously familiar feeling to it. Several days later, she called to tell me that the leukemia had returned and she was starting treatment again ASAP. That was September 2012. Other than risking a trip to hospital to visit early on during her treatment, we only saw each other 3 or 4 more times and only long enough to say 'hello" and maybe a quick coffee. Chemo, radiation, drugs, and a stem cell "transplant" - how you donate stem cells to yourself I still don't quite understand but no marrow doners could be found so it was thought that the SCT was the only/best option.

SHE's numbers improved rapidly and held long enough for her to begin to think that she was out of the woods. Her doctors certainly gave her that impression. Unfortunately, about October or so, her team told her that her numbers were worsening and that there was nothing else they felt they could do for her. She still felt good then - or at least SHE led me to believe that. I continued to look for viable options. Gene therapy, nanobees, Imbruvica was recently approved, ANYthing that may help save her. Supposedly, she brought it all to her team and they shot it all down for one reason or another.

November 30 I received an email from SHE saying that she had had a terrible week. Spent Thanksgiving in the ER and was afraid that she was going to die then. She never mentioned to me that she had developed blood blisters within the last few weeks. Never mentioned that she was feeling worse. She also told me not to call her until she said it was OK as, if anything happened, her S/O would take over her phone. She closed that email with, "For whatever it's worth, Thank you." I replied to that email, saying that she was bound to have bumps in the road and that she'd take her lumps and get through this latest trial and be stronger when she came out the other side.

December 1, I attended a holiday gathering and missed a phone call from SHE. It came at an odd hour so I knew that something wasn't right. Fearing the worst, I called the hospital and asked if SHE had been admitted which they confirmed and that she was in the ICU. Throwing everything aside, including the relationship I have been and am currently in, I drove the hour to the hospital only to find that her family had already arrived. Not wanting to cause a scene, because only one of her family members even had an idea that I existed, I stayed away from the ICU, choosing to sit in the parking lot for the next three hours as it was the closest I could safely be to SHE.

We never got to say goodbye. SHE passed at 4:20 am. I lost the woman that I have loved, the ONLY woman that I have truly loved, my soul mate. SHE found ME. SHE forgave me for everything. SHE was going to leave her relationship when she recovered. We talked about getting married. SHE wanted to. SHE would have said yes this time. We would have been incredibly happy trying to make up for the twenty years that I cost us. I would have given anything to be able to do that. We discussed me officially adopting her youngest son had we been able to finally be together before his 18th birthday. I was finally going to have my own family, my own kids, even if they were stepchildren. And now SHE is gone. And I can't follow her this time. And it's killing me. I have absolutely nowhere that I can go with this. I'm just sad. And I can't tell my S/O why. I realize that I did this to myself. But SHE was supposed to beat this again. SHE caught it much earlier this time. SHE was stronger for this round than she was the first. I'd give anything I could to be able to hold her again. But SHE's gone.

I met with SHE's daughter last week. It turned out that she knew exactly who I was after all. SHE and her daughter were very close. Daughter didn't want her family finding out about me because it would kill them. I understood that. I had stayed away from the hospital and SHE's life celebration out of respect for SHE and her family. We talked for about 3 hours. Daughter asked some hard questions of me and I answered them truthfully. I THINK daughter understands why things happened the way they did. As hard as it was for both of us, it was important for me to tell daughter about the how and when I was planning to ask SHE to marry me. Right down to the exact dates of the meteor shower I was going to do it under. IT was important to me to make sure that daughter knew just how seriously I was taking this second chance I had. I hadn't seen daughter since she was five. She grew up to be just as beautiful as SHE was. And, like mother like daughter, had her son when she was only 17 making SHE a grandmother at 35. And I had no problem becoming a step-father to three and grandfather to two at 46.

SHE wasn't supposed to die. SHE was supposed to fight through this, recover, get stronger and be with me for the rest of our long and happy lives. I go from sobbing to angry and back again in all of five minutes. I do it a dozen times a day. And I have to hide it all. And it's killing me. And I did this to myself. But I HAD to try to be truly happy again. I haven't been for such a long time. Not many people get a second chance with "the one that got away." I couldn't let that pass by again. And now SHE is gone. And I have nothing but two years worth of voice mails, texts and emails that I've read and re-read and listened to a million times in the last three weeks. I still get to hear her voice. Her laughter. The smile in her voice when SHE was talking to me. But I don't have her. And I never will again. and i'm just lost. SHE is the last thing I think about before I fell asleep and the first things when I wake up. I can't sleep. I can't eat. And I can't explain why to my S/O. "Fortunately", I can just say that it's my PTSD causing me to just have bad days. I've never been good at the holidays anyway.

SHE was my inspiration and motivation for climbing out of the hole that I've been stuck in for almost 10 years now. SHE was going to force me to be social again. SHE was my reason for losing weight and getting back in shape and just generally getting my life back together after a long, long road. And now it's all gone. And it's killing me.

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I'm so sorry for your loss. I know how unbelievably hard it is. I lost my husband to cancer in July. There's not really much you can do to lessen the pain. Hopefully time will help.

The only thing I think you should do for sure is to continue being inspired by her. She will always be a part of you so live for her as if she were still alive until you don't need to.

K

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Thank you, Karen. It's like "Groundhog Day" for me. Same thing. Every day. I know it hasn't even been a month yet but still....

And, like when you start looking for a particular car on the road, I can't turn around without running into an ad for cancer treatment of some sort now. 3x I've tried to go to the gym to keep at least SOME semblance of my normal routine going. For some reason, they choose to have a TV in the locker room. And, invariably, an ad comes on for treatment or donations or something and I just pack my stuff up and leave because it just destroys what little motivatIon I had to get there in the first place.

It's bad enough that SHE lost her battle. But then 4 days later, there is a huge announcement of a major breakthrough in gene therapy treating blood cancers, including ALL Leukemia. Something like an 80% success rate even in adults. 19 of 22 subjects cured or in significant remission. 4 DAYS. I get selfish and start to wonder if I am being punished for something I did or didn't do. And then I remember that at least I'm still alive. If SHE could only have held on for another 30 days maybe....

I can't talk about this with the few friends that I do have. I obviously can't talk about this with any of SHE's friends. I'm just slipping deeper into the hole that SHE helped me climb out of a year ago.

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This year isn't even 12 hours old and I already hate it. SHE is now gone 30 days. I'm still here. Trying like hell to get through this. What doesn't kill you... I don't want to be this strong... I didn't need to be any stronger. I just needed to be happy again. And now I can't imagine ever coming close to it again.

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TheOtherOne - I too lost the love of my life to leukemia, but my Tom had AML. He too went through a SCT but from a donor not his own cells. So I understand at least some of what SHE went through and I am sorry that SHE had such a hard journey. And I understand some of what you are going through. My Tom and I were good "work friends" for almost 12 years as we concentrated on making bad marriages work and raising children from those marriages. We finally admitted our love and acted upon that love. We both left our bad marriages and finally became man and wife after 17 years of emotionally supporting and loving one another, most of those years from afar. We had almost 21 years of a most beautiful marriage. My Tom is my everything. I am now so lost and so alone without his physical presence. I still feel his spirit with me but that is not enough. The cancer commercials on TV seem so very hurtful as though they are mocking me. The comments about how I should be grateful that we had so many years together bring no comfort or the knowledge that no matter how many years we had it wasn't enough. I regret the time I wasted trying to make a bad marriage work while the love of my life was there right in front of me. I wonder whether my Tom would have left his first marriage sooner had I professed my love in those early years. So many questions without answers. So many regrets....

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Thank you, Alone. I go back and forth wondering whether I would have been better off had SHE never reached out to me. Her youngest son is now 17. I met him when he was probably less than a year old as he was still in his crib. So I had 17 years to move on from SHE. Obviously, I never got over her. But at least I had come to accept what had happned with us and had moved on. While I'm absolutely grateful for the opportunity to have apologized to her in person and make sure that she understood WHY everything happened as it did, had I known that she was going to leave me again, "for good" this time, I'm not sure that I would have welcomed the experience so readily.

I realized early on that I wanted a strong, independant woman. Someone that didn't have to rely on me. Didn't need me to survive. SHE was that woman for many reasons. The woman I've been with for the last 15 +/- years is a good woman. Incredibly intellligent. She started out strong. But an accident at the house 2 years after we bought the house together left her with a traumatic brain injury resulting in occasional seizures amoung other things. She also lost most of the hearing in an ear as a result. That has a whole seperate bucket of guilt attached to it as we could never get the hearing repaired or TBI diagnosed. Because of that, she stopped driving. I've driven her everywhere for the vast majority of our relatoinship. She also has other medical issues that have resulted not only in an inability to become pregnant but weight gain of 100+ lbs. and other related problems. I gave up asking her to find a way to get healthy years ago. As I never know how she slept the night before I don't disturb her in the morning. Some days she sleeps until noon. There have been days where she's slept until 3 or 4pm. I start each day asking how she's feeling when she gets up because that tends to set the tone for the day. Unfortunately, there just really isn't much left of the relationship because of all of this.

SHE, on the other hand, was incredible. Turns out that SHE actually had some of the same helth problems as well. But SHE did something about it. At rouighly 35 and after 3 children she opted for a hysterectomy in order to greatly improve her own health. Single mother most of her life as she was only married before I first met her 25 years ago. And even after beating the leukemia once SHE had taxi her S/O and her own daughter to work and back each day as neither had a driver's license. And she continued this while in treatment when she relapsed. I never would have had to worry about her needing me for anything.

We were pretty much rescuing each other from dead relationships. SHE inspired me to actually try again. Even my s/o commented that I was actually getting better, that I was "coming back" to living again. But was because of SHE that it was happening. And now SHE is gone. And I've lost my motivatoin and inspiration. What good is doing something "in someone's memory" when they will never know what it is that you've done? I can't find the inspiration in that. Not right now anyway. I've been here before. Wanting to just give up. Depressoin, anxiety and PTSD nearly took me down once already in my life. I was just starting to get my strength back - thanks to SHE.

I recently realized that the fact that SHE's family and friends will never know about me is also bothering me. SHE's daughter knew. And she met with me. But it's become apparent that she wants no more contact with me. And I understand that. I really have no right trying to force my way into their lives and it just wouldn't be productive. SHE had one friend, that I'm aware of, with whom she trusted our relationship. That friend enabled SHE and I to see each other on many occasoins including the only full night that we got to spend together. When I have the strenght, I'm going to reach out to her in an effort to try to come to some resolve with SHE's passing. I only hope it helps because I really have nowhere else that I can go with this grief. It just keeps piling up and I don't know how to get rid of it.

At 46, I'm looking at re-inventing myself and completely tearing down my life. It's something that just needs to happen before it's too late. If you could see what the last decade that I lived through was like it would be easier to understand because right now it sounds like nothing more than a mid-life crisis. And, as scared as I was at the prospect of it, I was also looking forward to it because I was going to do it with SHE. But now she's gone and I'm going to have to do it alone because it's still something that needs to be done. And it's terrifying me because I don't know that I'm strong enough to accomplish it. And if I can't, I don't know what happens to me.

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46 is so very young... my Tom and I wed when he was 47 and I was 39. It will take great strength and enormous commitment, but I am I told that we can all learn to live with our grief... that we can find reasons to go on. I don't know what those reasons are for either of us but I am sure the reasons exist. What a blessing it would be if those reasons would present themselves.

My husband's sons from his first marriage have nothing to do with me now that they know they are in my will. Those boys provided the only grandchildren, so I have no grandchildren to tell stories about their grandpa to. I have moved back to my original hometown, away from the home my Tom and I shared. Very few people here knew my Tom and I as a couple. So like you I feel cutoff from the comfort that shared stories would provide. I have my son so I do have one person who knew US.

If I may offer one piece of advice, please keep "keep the door open" for a relationship with SHE's daughter and SHE's friend. That is what I am doing with stepsons and their children. This was good advice my Tom gave all who would listen regarding all people we encounter in this world. My Tom was a very good man loved by many. He learned not to "shut doors" during his 29 months of active duty in Vietnam. During that active duty time he learned just how precious life is and to how enjoy every day no matter what that day brought. He taught me that people will move in and out of our lives as they are able. Each day I remind myself of those lessons, get out of bed and start another day hoping I can find a way to rekindle the joy in living that I had with my Tom.

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Oh SHE's daughter knows that she can contact me if/whenever she wants/needs. Despite SHE telling me when we first decided to become more involved that dau encouraged her to do so "if it would make her happy" dau told me that she did not support or encourage the relationship. I doubt that I'll ever hear from her again unless SHE somehow left instructions for her. DAu says she is just trying to protect what's left of her family and that if her brothers found out about the relatoinship it would kill them. And I don't blame her at all for it. As much as I may wish, there really is no reason to stay in touch with them as I was never in their lives. THey've all had SHE's s/o in their lives for the last 7 years. Youngest son lived with SHE and s/o so my intrusion would really be of no benenfit. Dog only knows how my failed relationship with SHE 20 years ago affected all of them anyway. I have an inkling as to how and, to be honest, I don't think I could take knowing everything.

I can't stop myself from reading email and listening to voice mail... Listened to a 4/2011 vm last night that SHE left me at 2am from her bed. SHE and s/o had just gotten in from a night out with friends. SHE was sooo sad b/c s/o just kept drinking that night - per usual. SHE ended up carrying him in the house and leaving him on the couch. SHe was softly crying and asking "what she did to deserve this." At that point we were still just talking and hand't become involved yet. I've probably got a dozen messages like that over the last three years. "He embarrassed me in front of all of our friends tonight.", "He almost got in a fight tonight.", " He almost got arrested tonight.", Well, here I am again, all alone. He's passed out downstairs." "It's 2pm and he's still upstairs hungover." It's just killing me. In this particular scenario, a bottle of rum lasts me a good 5 or 6 months. We just would have been so good for each other now. I was happy whenever I just heard her voice. We didn't even have to be together.

I keep hoping that someone will reach out and tell me that this really is just a way for her to disappear again and that SHE is still alive somewhere. B/c that would mean that there is still a chance that she could find me again. I had an old phone line from a telecommuting job I had a few years ago that was somehow still active. It was SHE's "bat phone" and was OK for her to call 24/7. I got sick of checking it for missed calls and messages so I took it off the wall last weekend. I still start every day by walking in the office, turning the computer on and looking at the empty space on the wall where the damned phone used to hang... Dog help me, I don't know how I'm going to get through this...

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I can relate to parts of your story. Someone very special to me died a few months ago, and we had to keep our relationship secret. So I can't even grieve openly. So I do empathize with you. I'll post my story in another thread - I don't want to hijack yours. But I do get it. And I'm sorry. Every day I wonder how I will get through it. I think about him every minute of every day. Take care.

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