Dreaming of Robert
Last night I dreamed of Robert for the first time since he died. I had wished to dream of him, to see him again.
In my dream, I was sleeping and woke to find his naked body — strong, no back fractures — beside me. I sidled into his embrace, inhaling his scent (which I always loved, and which was vividly real in the dream!). Oh, he’s just been away on a trip! I thought, trying to make sense of his beautiful body beside me.
Suddenly I started to sob to him, “I can’t bear being apart from you! Let’s stay together for the rest of our lives!””Yes,” he answered quietly.I looked into his dear face. He was gazing at me intently, lovingly.”But how did you get here?” I asked him, suddenly thinking that our house was a long way from the airport. “I have your car!”He looked at me puzzled and perhaps amused. Then he started to fade away and I woke up. 
(photos by Robert’s son, Mitch Rice)
Our Last Kiss
On August 2, 2001, I kissed Robert for the first time in the moonlight after our line dance class.
On August 2, 2008, I kissed him for the last time.
***
Those of you who read Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex after Sixty know our love story, and know that Robert was living with leukemia and lymphoma. After the book was published, Robert had six months of chemotherapy , leaving his cancer in remission. We had two glorious years of health, vigor, and intense, joyful love after that. We felt we were the happiest, luckiest couple in the world.
Last April, Robert was diagnosed with a new blood cancer: multiple myeloma. It’s a debilitating, painful, and incurable cancer of the bone marrow, causing extreme bone pain and fragility. Within a month he was living with five spinal fractures and excruciating pain, despite the best efforts of his medical team and an array of powerful narcotics.
I didn’t write anything about our life during this time because Robert asked for privacy. If you’re a regular reader, surely you noticed that I became curiously silent for most of the past couple of months, and when I did post, it lacked the personal candor that you expect from me.
Ten days before his death, Robert entered into home hospice care, and the marvelous hospice team was able to bring him relief from the pain. He then wavered between sleeping and waking, sometimes marvelously lucid and rational, often only partially conscious, and occasionally uttering beautiful messages from the world he was visiting. Here are some of the things he told me as he floated in and out of lucidity, and I’ll treasure
them always:
• “Do you remember the time we laughed so hard that we shook the feathers off our caps?”
• “We did have fun together, didn’t we? We did have fun.”
• “Wasn’t it wonderful when we walked in the water in every state, or almost every state?”
• “It was just yesterday that we walked and walked, and I knew the name of every flower.”
• “I came by here hoping to see you.”
***
Yes, I’m still committed to this work I do as an activist for elder sexuality, and don’t worry, I’ll have my voice back soon. My work was almost as important to Robert as it is to me, and he made me promise I’d keep my torch burning. He was a private person, and sometimes I embarrassed him with my candor, but he believed I was doing the right thing talking out loud about this hush-hush topic, and he supported me all the way.
I welcome your comments here and your private emails to me. I know I have many readers who have visited without commenting. If my work here has made a difference to you, if you learned something useful or were moved by my book, I hope you’ll honor me with your words. I could use them now.
Warmly,
Joan
How has your idea changed of what sex is?
I was interviewed by Audacia Ray for her Naked City column for the Village Voice online. Audacia asked me, “How has your idea of what ‘sex’ is changed over your lifetime?”
In my teens and early twenties, I was trying to shed the restrictions I had been taught by family and society about sex being bad until a wedding band somehow transformed it, so sex was rebellion. Although I willingly shed my virginity at 17, I didn’t have an orgasm until two years later. Being a child of the 1950’s, I didn’t even know what/where my clitoris was or what made it work, until a more experienced college boy showed me. I haven’t stopped enjoying it since!
From my mid-twenties to early-thirties, sex was both an expression of love and an exploration of what turned me on. I was in two committed relationships (serially) during that time, and I loved the high and the bonding of sex.
In my mid-thirties and through my forties, sex was the Big O: orgasm, as frequently as possible. I was in a love relationship for part of that time which was sometimes exclusive and sometimes open, and after that broke up, I went a bit crazy with the excitement of multiple partners. This was my real coming of age, sexually. I discovered the glory of powerful orgasms, whether alone or with a partner (or series of partners), filling my drawers with vibrators and my datebook with eager men.
During all this time, my hormonal, biological urge was propelling my sex drive. After menopause, all this shifted.
I was a post-menopausal single woman, needing lubricant, taking longer to get aroused and reach orgasm, and as eager as I was to keep my sex life going, often I felt invisible to potential partners. I still felt youthful and vibrant in my mind (still do, at 64!), but my face started showing my age, and boom, men were no longer interested. It was amazing to me, really.
Then at age 57, I fell in love with Robert, who was then 64. Our love affair was the reason I wrote my book, Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty. My sex drive was no longer hormonally driven. Rather, it was driving by love, the yearning to bond deeply, and a deep commitment to my lover’s pleasure as much as (sometimes more than) my own. We married when I was 62, he 69. Ours has been the great love of both our lives. It has also been the best sex, because joining together is a culmination of everything we’ve experienced in our lives as well as our deep love for each other. It’s spiritual as well as physical.
How would YOU answer the question, “How has your idea of what ‘sex’ is changed over your lifetime?”
For the rest of the interview, please click here.
Man, 20, loves “slow burning flame” of late-40’s lover
I received a powerful email from Elliot, age 20, who is in a passionate relationship with a woman in her late forties. He writes:
My lover and I are very affectionate, very loving and ultimately very content with each other. Personally, I enjoy the pace, as I am not given a time limit on anything, much less anything sexual. I am given a reign of freedom that most men would divorce for, and my lover herself is so passionate yet so trusting and warm, and dare I say it, cuddly, that she presents the very thing that I have yearned for, yet never found in women my age!
This slow-burning flame I have the fortune to enjoy day after day is something I find much more cosy, more inviting, but finally something that can truly blaze with raw passion, rather than the all-consuming forest fires I seem to find so common in anyone my age. After all, I want to be warm, secure and loved, not burnt over and over again.
So what, in the above paragraph, involves some sort of magic age limit? Where does the question of age come into this? As I write this, I found myself needing to ask my lover what her age actually was, as we see it as something so inconsequential, something so trivial and ultimately so near enough to pointless that I don’t even try to remember it. If my wants and desires are met, does it matter if that person is anything between 18 and 65? Of course not. If I find the perfect lover, her age is practically meaningless..
I want a woman who I can cradle lovingly in my arms and read quietly to, so that she will dream a wonderous dream while she sleeps. I want a woman who can be so very vixen in her nature, but so very kitten in her love when she chooses either. I want a woman who is as intelligent as she is loving, with a quiet intensity, but most of all, with a love for being orally pleasured until she passes out after god only knows how long. Where, I ask you, can I find these qualities in a better way than choosing an older woman?
I honestly believe that I must have undergone some major task, some amazing feat in a previous life, to be rewarded with an almost perfect bliss day after day. No, I choose to keep my bliss close to my heart, rather than trying a younger girl, and honestly? When I masturbate when she is not with me, visions of younger girls don’t do it for me anymore. She’s the one flame I have eyes for.