Our "Usness"

Our Parisian Honeymoon, July 1996

We spoke openly of how our love might endure once Martijn was not present in the physical realm. These conversations were difficult, most difficult and touching and wrenching. Martijn found it easier to tell me of his beliefs in the love beyond space and time by quoting from respected authors. Now, as I endure pain sometimes so dark and bleak that I'd rather depart this earth, I try, really try to allow Martijn's love to in fact be transformative, transcendent. When I let myself, I feel this radiance and let it fill me with hope. It will take all my strength to overcome the loss of the physical tenderness,  gentleness,  happiness and even rapture that Martijn's mere physical presence provided. Our "Usness" was integral to our love - it existed not only in romantic embraces, but in the sheer affection and attentiveness we lavished on the other. What, I ask, what can replace this tenderness? How does my soul accept this ethereal, spiritual evolution when as a beating, breathing heart I so crave the warmth of my beloved?

I will take faith from Martijn's beliefs. Here are the two most touching pieces he presented me. The first is taken from a precious handwritten card for my 58th birthday:

Friday, the 4th of april 2008,

To my most beloved wife,

I feel very, very sad to write this down, and I don't know what words to choose. I borrow the words from Elisabeth Barrett-Browning, Sonnet XLI, from the Portuguese:

"Oh to shoot my soul's full meaning in to future years,

  That they should lend it utterance and salute

  Love that endures with Life that disappears!"

From your husband Martijn

This final note was left for me to find, marked in a book 

by the philosopher Binswanger that he was intending to use 

for his work on a thesis about love beyond time and space.

From Ludwig Binswanger, the German philosopher, 

Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins. Zurich

But how are things when death does not meet You but Me? 

Even then, as your You, I am not dying; 

even then the Usness in love does not decay. 

I can only die as an individual, but not as the You of an I. 

When I die as an individual, then yet in dying, 

I am more than ever Yours, part of our Usness. 

As I received “my life” from your hands anew – 

from yours as the hands of the lover 

as much as only through you, 

the being in Usness “opened up” for me – 

I put it back into your hands when dying. 

I do not die the “heavy” death of an isolated “I”, 

but say goodbye to you knowing 

that even in this parting is still presence 

because the lover as someone who was here 

is still here in the sense of the existence of the Usness, 

a Here that rips open the depths and abysses of existence even more; 

that calls it even more into the eternal presence of love 

and allows it to exist within that love.