My wife and I are living a very similar story. She was my first love and we were together for five years before career changes and my stupidity separated us. We met when I was serving in the Navy in 1968. When I left the service, I moved back to Oregon that had always been home to me. She had relocated to the Bay Area where I was stationed so we could be together. She had begun what turned into a very successful career in a major telecommunications company. The separation was fatal to our relationship.
We had no contact for forty-one years. I married, had two sons and a long career in architecture. Because she had focused on her career, she never married. She rose to a management level and transferred to the East Coast.
My life was settled. I had a thriving practice. My wife and I had a wonderful marriage and faced some family tragedies together with the strength that came from our love. Our first son was born three months premature. We lost our third son at childbirth and almost lost our second child when he was brutally beaten and robbed. We weathered those storms and life was finally tranquil and predictable.
One Friday afternoon it all changed when a police officer walked into my office and told me my wife had been in an auto accident. She had suffered a pulmonary embolism and lost consciousness just as she was arriving at my office to surprise me with a frozen latte. Within thirty-six hours of alternating hope and despair, she was gone.
I was in the process of reinventing my life when I received one of those messages on LinkedIn suggesting a possible connection. It was my first love, Patti, who was now going by the more professional name of Pat. All I had to do was click “yes”. Because our separation had been less than amicable, I was not expecting her to accept me as a connection. Much to my amazement, she accepted my invitation.
We exchanged friendly but formal emails in which we shared the substance of our lives apart. We discovered that separated by decades and a continent, we had grown closer together in many ways. She was relieved to learn that I had not become a conservative, politically, socially or morally. We shared things we had never talked about in our carefree youthful relationship. We referred to this as “Quantum Entanglement”, the phenomenon in physics where particles, once in contact, remain connected across time and space.
We arranged a face to face meeting in Vancouver, Washington, halfway between our homes. That really began our new life together. A few months later we got engaged on a starlit night in the Sea of Cortez aboard her brother’s boat. She insisted on waiting a year to marry to give my family time to adjust to my new life with someone they knew nothing of before my wife’s passing.
A little over five years ago we married with all of my family and many friends in attendance. We’re both enjoying a brand new life without the pressures of work and frequent separation. I love stories like this because I’m living one.
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