The Healing Journey

August 18, 2023

“And I love you so.
Though people ask me how,
How I’ve lived till now.
I tell them I don’t know.

I guess they understand
How lonely life has been.
But life began again
The day you took my hand.”

– Don McLean

There was a song that reminded him of her. A song when they first met. It was “their song.” They loved it so much, they couldn’t stop singing it. And they danced to it at their wedding. Don McLean, “And I Love You So,” which Perry Como also recorded and made it into a hit in 1973. It expressed everything about them, and how their lives, too, began again “the day you took my hand.”

And after years of marriage, she died, and the pain was the greatest pain he had ever felt, but his family and friends insisted it was hard, but it would pass. His friends told him a lot of things, and his closest friend even went so far as to suggest that once he got over his grief, he would find love again. While he was sure that was probably true, he didn’t want it to be. Quite simply, he just wanted to die.

But then, as the days, the months, the years passed, he realized everything they told him was true. His life began again. Even though the memories persisted, they seemed to dim because of time and distance. He did meet someone new. They weren’t the same, but he learned to love her and he was convinced she was sent to him.

Then, one day while he was driving home from work and stuck in traffic on I95, he turned on a classic rock station, and they were playing “their song,” and one of the stanzas suddenly made sense:

***

“The book of life is brief and once a page is read,
All but love is dead. That is my belief.”