Girl: Slow down. I’m scared.
Guy: No this is fun.
Girl: No its not. Please, it’s too scary!
Guy: Then tell me you love me.
Girl: Fine, I love you. Slow down!
Guy: Now give me a BIG hug. (Girl hugs him)
Guy: Can u take my helmet off and put it on? It’s bugging me.

In the paper the next day: A motorcycle had crashed into a building because of break failure. Two people were on the motorcycle, but only one survived.

Recently, John lost his wife Janet. For eight years she fought against cancer, but in the end her sickness had the last word.

One day John took out a folded piece of paper from his wallet. He had found it, so he told me, when he tidied up some drawers at home. It was a small love letter Janet had written. The note could look like a school girl’s scrawls about her dream guy. All that was missing was a drawing of a heart with the names John and Janet written in it. But the small letter was written by a woman who had had seven children; a woman who fought for her life and who probably only had a few months left to live.

It was also a beautiful recipe for how to keep a marriage together.

Janet’s description of her husband begins thus: "Loved me. Took care of me. Worried about me."

Even though John always had a ready answer, he never joked about cancer apparently. Sometimes he came home in the evening to find Janet in the middle of one of those depressions cancer patients so often get. In no time he got her into the car and drove her to her favourite restaurant.

He showed consideration for her, and she knew it. You cannot hide something for someone who knows better.

"Helped me when I was ill," the next line reads. Perhaps Janet wrote this while the cancer was in one of the horrible and wonderful lulls. Where everything is — almost — as it used to be, before the sickness broke out, and where it doesn’t hurt to hope that everything is over, maybe forever.

"Forgave me a lot."

"Stood by my side."

And a piece of good advice for everyone who looks on giving constructive criticism as a kind of sacred duty: "Always praising."

"Made sure I had everything I needed," she goes on to write.

After that she has turned over the paper and added: "Warmth. Humour. Kindness. Thoughtfulness." And then she writes about the husband she has lived with and loved the most of her life: "Always there for me when I needed you."

The last words she wrote sum up all the others. I can see her for me where she adds thoughtfully: "Good friend."

I stand beside John now, and cannot even pretend to know how it feels to lose someone who is as close to me as Janet was to him. I need to hear what he has to say much more than he needs to talk.

"John," I ask. "How do you stick together with someone through 38 years — not to mention the sickness? How do I know if I can bear to stand by my wife’s side if she becomes sick one day?"

I think the specter of our breakup has changed me far more than our
relationship. Away from the warm glow of naivete, the memories of us seem trite. It is true that only we assign meaning to our experiences. On paper they mean nothing. We went camping with my family. I snuck clandestine visits to his house after school. He biked out to my house in the middle of the night. We hung out with his friends. He got the chicken pox. We made out in the hallways at school and passed notes. We drove - a lot, we drank some, we smoked pot once. And of course we had sex, my first. We were in going to be married, you see.

Mostly, we had no fear. We talked about ourselves, our dreams, our
childhoods, our parents. Each discussion was a wonderful opening, with no fear of what we might discover or lose. Every fact, every feeling shared was a precious thing to be cherished and savored. Our universe did not understand the possibility of loss.

Eventually, there was another. There always is in these stories. She took him away with a kiss. To explain the complete and utter vacancy of the following months would be difficult. At least there were tangible side effects: the loss of 25 pounds, the withdrawal, the tears, and tears, and tears. To this day I have not replenished them. Only after I rebuilt myself did he want me back. But the me had that had been was lost.

It is more than ten years later. The person he missed hasn’t returned. I don’t think she will. I look for her sometimes, in boxes of old things, but she is never there. The beach is my place now. It is small consolation for a lost self. I know now that our relationship was far from perfect. I know what he has done with his life, and what I have done with mine, and logically, I understand them to be incompatible. What I really miss is the me that didn’t consider such things.