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Through the centuries much has been written on the bond between husband and wife. When that bond is solid and loving there is nothing as strong or as meaningful in all the world. When that bond is broken, as it is in death, the one who is left can feel ripped apart, literally cut in half. It takes two sides to make a coin. If you don't have both sides, you don't have a coin, you just have a piece of worthless metal.
Until she died, I never understood just how much Jane contributed to what made me, me. She was much more than simply half of our relationship; she made me a whole person. Without her I'm exactly like that one-side of a coin. The expression, "you don't know what you have until you lose it," has never been truer for me than it is now. The following thoughts were written years ago by some pretty smart people who understood the depth of love between a husband and wife. Their words hit every chord in my heart. As the expression goes, I couldn't say it better myself.
Benjamin Franklin wrote the following to a friend: "Marriage is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid happiness. It is the man and woman united that make the complete human being. Separate, she wants his force of body and strength of reason; he, her softness, sensibility, and acute discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the world. A single man has not nearly the value he would have in the state of union. He is an incomplete animal; he resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors."
President Ronald Reagan wanted everybody to know that the greatest treasure was not his successful career or the money he made. His greatest treasure was his marriage. Reagan famously said to Nancy, "I more than love you, I'm not whole without you. You are life itself to me."
Author Cornell Woolrich wrote this short bit of observation on the state of a man without a wife in his novel, "Waltz into Darkness." "A man without a wife, he ain't a whole man at all, he's just a shadow walking around without no one to cast him.
I've been walking around like a shadow without no one to cast me for over a year and a half. At first I was literally crushed, inconsolably injured. I was bleeding out. The initial bleeding has subsided somewhat, but I'm still in a lousy place. Loneliness, sadness, frustration, anger, regret, and yearning have filled the void in my heart that was once occupied by Jane. Without her I am just a shadow of a man. The odd half of a pair of scissors. A one-sided coin.
There is some comfort, however, in knowing that others, many, many others have felt the same desperate heartache and loss as I have. Another of our presidents, our 2nd one, John Adams, had a well-known and long and loving marriage to his wife, Abigail. Their letters to each other, well over one thousand, have been preserved and testify to the deep love, respect, and emotional attachment they had for over 54 years. Many books on Adams have covered this, one of the most recent ones, "A Perfect Coincidence," I have just finished reading.
Author Jim Rasenberger notes how distraught John was when Abigail became gravely ill with typhoid fever. "The dear partner of my life for fifty-four years as a wife and for many years more as a lover now lies, in extremis," he wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. He did not tell Jefferson that as he sat in a chair at Abigail's bedside, he trembled so violently that he could not stand; or that he turned to his family and said, "I wish I could lay down beside her and die too."
After Abigail's death, Jefferson (who years earlier had suffered the loss of his wife and four of his six children) wrote the following to Adams, in what Rasenberger calls a condolence letter for the ages:
"Tried myself, in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, and suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that, for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicines. I will not therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more, where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both that the term is not very distant at which we are to deposit, in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved & lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again. G od bless you and support you under your heavy affliction."
A condolence letter for the ages, indeed. That Thomas Jefferson certainly had a way with words.
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