A Stunning Gift!

A veritable miracle has shattered my unshakable disbelief in the supernatural. My doubts are having doubts. I swoon in the confusion that generally precedes true enlightenment.Imagine, if you will, that first romantic dinner, the candlelight and soft music, European waiters dressed in tuxedos, maybe with a strolling violinist pretending to be Fritz Kreisler. There are fancy drinks to loosen things up. Quiet laughter interrupting serious exchanges. Eyes staring into widening eyes. Your partner-to-be is growing more attractive by the minute (or the drink). Everything is going well, or so it seems. Body parts are twitching.Then the point is reached where someone like me has to say, I hope this won’t make any difference, but I have an incurable, universally-fatal cancer. I'm not sure I'll be here next year.[thud]Add to that, although I don’t look particularly ill, I’m currently recovering from a spinal compression fracture and spend way too much time recuperating in front of the TV or seeing doctors.

I would have summed up my romantic future in a single word: hopeless. I'm not exactly every woman's dream date, am I!I was diagnosed nearly eleven years ago and have lived alone all that time, which has not been my preference. For a couple of years I had a married mistress, which kept me sane, but no real girlfriend. You could count the number of times I shared my bed at night on the fingers of one hand. Talk about being touch deprived!

I deeply regret the effort I made over those years to reconcile with my former wife because I wasn't whole-heartedly available to anyone else. If I add my heartless children to the mix—ta-da!—I seem destined to die alone.

Except it hasn’t turned out that way. Love has come to Lonnie, whacking me in the back of the head when I wasn't looking. Meet Ivonne. We had been friends for about a year before she volunteered to help me get through the bone marrow transplant that didn't happen in February and, wondrously, decided to stay anyway.

The relationship is impossible. She is thirty-two and I'm sixty-four. She's a Mexican national living in Tijuana. Neither of us is fluent in the language of the other. There are huge cultural differences, educational differences, class differences, a massive power imbalance, and four children who range from something like eleven to fourteen. She is Catholic, I am secular Jewish. I'm weak from fighting the cancer and she's vibrant, funny, and thoroughly healthy.And, yet, it works. Both of us say, at least once a day, "Impossible!" And, then, "We'll make it work." After a spirited debate, we decided that she gets to be Cinderella (although I was a strong contender).

In the midst of a stubborn relapse, with the pain and misery of chemotherapy plus the unbearable uncertainty of the future, I find myself to be ridiculously happy. Because of all our differences, everything that once was routine is now an adventure. I remember that in high school they were selling foreign languages as the key to fascinating foreign cultures. So I was unproductively drilled in Spanish, French, German, and Latin, I enjoyed travel where I could butcher the local language, but I never experienced the excitement and fun of cross-cultural exploration until now. I am discovering how another culture thinks about what I fatuously take for granted. How liberating! How unnerving!I even begin to understand border Spanish, although it seems to be a language composed entirely of idioms.

My gray hair hurts.I have been given a great gift. Love has come to rejuvenate me, giving me joy and hope when most needed and least expected. With the exception of my inviolate morning coffee and bagel, the dreary but comfortable routines of my life have been demolished, replaced by something I had nearly forgotten over the years of solitary struggle and, before that, bad marriages: fun. Every living thing in my house is happier, including I. Even my pets (three cats and a bird) have responded, playing enthusiastically and continuously. Gone is the "been there, done that" jadedness that had descended on me like a pall: all things old are indeed new again. Laughter, no longer of the hysterical kind, fills the spaces of my life.I feel so very, very lucky. There will be more to this story.