Posts Tagged ‘Joan’s love story’
“I’m Going to Make You Coffee….”
If you ask me if I still miss Robert, two years after his death, I answer, “Only when I breathe in or out.”
I still start each morning recapturing a memory. Today it was the way he opened his ocean-blue eyes in the morning and smiled, his face melting with love. “Let’s snuggle,” he would say. Then one of us would decide, “I’ll snuggle you,” and we would shift to our sides, the snuggler wrapped around the back of the snuglee.
I loved when Robert snuggled me, enveloping me, so close that we couldn’t tell where he ended and I began, if indeed there was a distinction. I would take his hand in both of mine, push my nose into his palm, and inhale deeply. His palm smelled of sleep, a warm, enticing smell that was totally Robert. I can still smell his hand, still taste his skin as I kissed him everywhere my mouth would reach.
Other mornings he woke ready to meet the day, his garden or art studio beckoning, no time for snuggling. He announced, “I’m going to make you coffee,” and I always responded, “I love it when you make me coffee.” He padded out to the kitchen to grind beans, boil water, and arrange the filter cone over a metal coffee pot that had journeyed with him for decades. 
The “make you coffee” ritual started early in our seven-year love affair, and persisted wherever we were, home or hotel, and whatever else was happening in our lives. Towards the end, when his body started succumbing to cancer, he told me, “As long as I can make you coffee in the morning, I know I’ll be all right.”
Then one morning, he tried to get up, and he couldn’t. He stumbled, his legs trembling, his back stabbing with pain, his brain unable to emerge from sleep. He sat back on the bed. “I can’t do it,” he told me, and we both cried, as I’m crying now, remembering the day that everything changed.
…Now I make my own coffee in his special coffee pot and carry it to the living room where I’m surrounded by Robert’s paintings. I write memories in my journal—snippets of sweet conversation, playful games we invented, afternoons that turned into evening as we made love as if life depended on it. Maybe it did.
Even though I write for a living, using a computer and all the tech tools available to me, I write my memory journal in longhand. Somehow writing longhand comes from the heart more than the brain, and I rediscover memories I had forgotten. 
My hand lingers over the page, and I picture Robert’s hand –the artist’s hand making love to the canvas, the gardener’s hand making love to the dirt, the dancer’s hand making love to the music, and my lover’s hand–making love to me. What does matter, at this point in my life, is that I’m taking with me the best of what Robert and I shared. That’s what he’d want for me, and what I want for myself. I find joy in my writing, in dance, in close friends, in physical and mental exercise, in learning, and yes, in my memories of Robert.
I hold my coffee cup to my cheek. It’s just the right temperature.
Our First Kiss, August 2, 2001
Robert and I shared our first kiss nine years ago today, under the full moon after our line dance class. It wasn’t a sudden kiss — I had pursued this sexy, dancing man for nine months. We had danced, talked, strolled, even choreographed together — but, though always kind, he kept his distance. He admitted later that he was a little afraid of me, saw me sometimes as Spider Woman (!) because I was so assertive.
If you’ve read Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty, you know that I finally propositioned him by email. He turned me down, explaining gently that he didn’t make these decisions quickly or rush into sex. (Nine months: Quickly? Rush?)
Later that night he emailed me again. He had changed his mind!
“It’s been a while for these old body parts,” he wrote. “Maybe it’s time.”
We made a date to take a walk after the next dance class and discuss what to do next. We strolled under the full moon, not touching, and then stopped at a park bench.
There we shared our first kiss. And our second. Third. Twentieth.
We necked and petted like teenagers, the silver moonlight spotlighting our excitement. Then we made a plan to spend the following Saturday at his house and explore the next dimension of our relationship.
We didn’t know then that we would fall in love. But we did. I was 57 and he 64.
The memory of our first kisses remains strong in my mind, nine years later. So does the memory of our last kiss, two years ago today. As I wail with grief because Robert is gone, I embrace the precious joy of the seven years of great love that we shared. So many people never find that, and we did.
It is fitting that I finished writing Naked at Our Age the day before this significant anniversary, because Robert told me, shortly before he died, “Promise me you’ll keep doing your work.” I honor him by doing that.
His heart was beating under my hand
I had a beautiful dream about Robert, and as I approach the second anniversary of losing him, I keep rerunning the dream in my mind.
In the dream, I awoke to the sound of a song playing in my living room. I went down the steps, and there was Robert dancing! He was spinning so fast that he was almost a blur. He was dancing as he must have danced as a young man, before I knew him, when he was studying ballet and modern dance. I watched with love and amazement.
He slowed his spinning, then stopped and smiled at me, that tender smile that filled his eyes with softness. I put my hand on his chest, hot and moist from his exertion. Then the most wonderful part of the whole dream: I felt his heart beating under my hand!
So many times in our seven years together (exactly, from first kiss to last), I rested my hand on his beating heart. It was always the first place I touched when we came together. It was where my hand rested when we snuggled after making love. I loved his fuzzy chest hair–the touch and smell and heat of it–and I loved his beating heart.
Fun is Sexy: Making Love Before Making Love
Robert and I had rituals, made-up words, silly secrets, and special games that warmed us with laughter, kept our intimacy strong, and made us feel like we were making love all day long. Silly things, sometimes – like “Panda.”
Robert and I used to exchange a tiny toy panda with paws that clutched tightly, permitting us to attach it to objects. I’d leave Panda attached to Robert’s shoelace, on his toothbrush handle, under his pillow, peeking out of his bathrobe pocket, even on top of the coffeepot — anywhere he’d find it unexpectedly and enjoy the surprise. 
Then when one of us would find Panda astride our favorite vibrator, or holding onto the lubricant nozzle, or on the pillow, little legs up, we’d understand the special invitation!