Love of My Life

I folded my hands on the table, steadying myself; I was shaking, nervous at what I would do. I was raw, fragile, vicious with grief. I would do anything. I rolled the rings around on my fingers. It was nothing fancy: He just kept looking at me steadily, as if he knew everything about me, as if he owned me. I felt distinctly that he might be a murderer. We left the cafe, his hand on my arm. They were what had drawn him to me. Also, he liked my boots. He thought I looked intriguing. He thought I looked mature. He was older, possibly thirty.

I walked with him to a parking lot behind a building. He was biting me. He bit my lips so hard I screamed. I stood, unmoving, stunned. The inside of my mouth began to bleed softly. Tears filled my eyes. I want my mother , I thought. My mother is dead. I thought this every hour of every day for a very long time: I want my mother. It was only a kiss, and barely that, but it was, anyway, a crossing. When I was a child I witnessed a leaf unfurl in a single motion.

One second it was a fist, the next an open hand. I never forgot it, seeing so much happen so fast. And this was like that — the end of one thing, the beginning of another: When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, my husband Mark and I took an unspoken sexual hiatus. His hands on my body made me weep. He went down on me in the gentlest of ways. I would soak in a hot bath, and he would lean into it to touch me. He wanted to make me feel good, better.

He loved me, and he had loved my mother. Mark and I were an insanely young, insanely happy, insanely in-love married couple. He wanted to help. No, no, no, I said, but then sometimes I relented. I closed my eyes and tried to relax. I breathed deep and attempted to fake it.

He fucked me and I sobbed uncontrollably. Which was mysteriously, unfortunately, precisely the problem. I was bereft, in agony, destroyed over her death. To experience sexual joy, it seemed, would have been to negate that reality. And more, it would have been to betray my mother, to be disloyal to the person she had been to me: She remarried when I was eleven. I needed my stepfather to be the kind of man who would suffer for my mother, unable to go on, who would carry a torch. We are not allowed this.

We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek , or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Countless well-intentioned friends, distant family members, hospital workers, and strangers I met at parties recited the famous five stages of grief to me: I was alarmed by how many people knew them, how deeply this single definition of the grieving process had permeated our cultural consciousness. Not only was I supposed to feel these five things, I was meant to feel them in that order and for a prescribed amount of time.

I did not deny. I did not get angry. Not my husband, but people I hardly knew, and in that I found a glimmer of relief. The people I messed around with did not have names; they had titles: Most of these people were men; some were women. I was happy and sexy and impetuous and fun. I was wild and enigmatic and terrifically good in bed.

I asked them questions about their lives, and they told me everything and asked few questions in return; they knew nothing about me. Because of this, most of them believed they were falling instantly, madly in love with me. I did what I did with these people, and then I returned home to Mark, weak-kneed and wet, bleary-eyed and elated.

What if it had been my last day? When I did think, I thought, I cannot continue to live without my mother. I was not proud of myself. We got into the habit of fucking in the middle of the night, both of us waking from a sound sleep to the reality of our bodies wet and hard and in the act. The sex lasted about thirty seconds, and we would almost always both come.

It was intensely hot and strange and surreal and darkly funny and ultimately depressing. We never knew who started it. Neither of us recalled waking, reaching for each other. It was a shard of passion, and we held on to it. For a while it got us through. We attempt to name, identify, and define the most mysterious of matters: We want these things to have an order, an internal logic, and we also want them to be connected to one another.

We want it to be true that if we cheat on our spouse, it means we no longer want to be married to him or her. We want it to be true that if someone we love dies, we simply have to pass through a series of phases, like an emotional obstacle course from which we will emerge happy and content, unharmed and unchanged. I listened to a long, traumatic story about a girlfriend who suddenly moved to Ohio, and to stories of grandfathers and old friends and people who lived down the block who were no longer among us.

Rarely was this helpful. I recognized these people: These people consoled me beyond measure. I felt profoundly connected to them, as if we were a tribe. Children survive childhood; women, the labors of birth; men, their work. We survive influenza and infection, cancer and heart attacks. We keep living on and on: We live younger, too; frightfully premature babies are cloistered and coddled and shepherded through. My mother lived to the age of forty-five and never lost anyone who was truly beloved to her.

Of course, she knew many people who died, but none who made her wake to the thought: I cannot continue to live. And there is a difference. Dying is not your girlfriend moving to Ohio. It is impolite to make this distinction. We act as if all losses are equal. It is un-American to behave otherwise: Every emotion felt is validated and judged to be as true as any other. But what does this do to us: Jewish tradition states that one is considered a mourner when one of eight people dies: It leaves out the step-relations, the long-term lovers, the chosen family of a tight circle of friends; and it includes the blood relations we perhaps never honestly loved.

But its intentions are true. And, undeniably, for most of us that list of eight does come awfully close. We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist.

Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye. I would be sitting across the table from a dear friend. I loved her, him, each one of these people. Some I said I loved like family. I dreamed incessantly about my mother. There was a theme. Two or three times a week she made me kill her.

She commanded me to do it, and I sobbed and got down on my knees, begging her not to make me, but she would not relent. In each dream, like a good daughter, I ultimately complied.

Love Of My Life

I tied her to a tree in our front yard, poured gasoline over her head, and lit her on fire. I took a miniature baseball bat and beat her to death with it. These dreams were not surreal.

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They took place in the plain light of day. They were the documentary films of my subconscious and felt as real to me as life. My truck was really my truck; our front yard was our actual front yard; the miniature baseball bat sat in our closet among the umbrellas. Mark grabbed me and held me.

He wetted a washcloth with cool water and put it over my face. What was there to do with me? What did those around me do? We narrate our own lesser stories of loss in an attempt to demonstrate that the sufferer is not really so alone. We make grossly inexact comparisons and hope that they will do. In short, we insist on ignoring the precise nature of deep loss because there is nothing we can do to change it, and by doing so we strip it of its meaning, its weight, its own fiercely original power. Nobody knew about my sexual escapades.

I kept waiting for them to cure me, or for something to cure me of them. Barb was in her early thirties, and I was ten. Her hair was brown and shoulder length, her skin clear and smooth as a bar of soap. She had the kind of tall body that made you acutely aware of the presence of its bones: Barb got into her car and started the engine.

Her car was parked in a garage and all the doors were closed and she had stuffed a Minnesota Vikings cap into the exhaust pipe. My mother explained this to me in detail: I was more curious than sad. But in the months that followed, I thought of Barb often. I came to care for her.

I nurtured an inflated sense of my connection to her. Recently, another acquaintance of mine died. He was beautiful and young and free-spirited and one hell of a painter. He went hiking one day on the Oregon coast and was never seen again. The deaths of those people made me sad, afraid, and angry; they made me question the fairness of the world, the existence of God, and the nature of my own existence.

But they did not make me suffer. They did not make me think, I cannot continue to live. In fact, in their deaths I felt more deeply connected to them, not because I grieved them, but because I wanted to attach myself to what is interesting.

The Love Of My Life - The Sun Magazine

It is interesting to be in a Chinese restaurant and see a poster of the smiling face of an acquaintance, who is one hell of a painter, plastered on the front door. It is interesting to be able to say, I know him , to feel a part of something important and awful and big. The more connections like this we have, the more interesting we are.

I did not want to attach myself to it. It was her life that I clung to, her very, very interesting life. When she died, she was about to graduate from college, and so was I. We had started together. Her college was in Duluth, mine in Minneapolis. After a lifetime of struggle and sacrifice, my mother was coming into her own. After three children and nine years of misery, my mother left him. My father had recently moved us to a small town near Minneapolis in pursuit of a job prospect.

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When they divorced, he went back to Pennsylvania, but my mother stayed. She worked as a waitress and in a factory that made small plastic containers that would eventually hold toxic liquids. We lived in apartment complexes full of single mothers whose children sat on the edges of grocery-store parking lots. We received free government cheese and powdered milk, food stamps and welfare checks. After a few years, my mother met my stepfather, and when he fell off a roof on the job and hurt his back, they took the twelve-thousand-dollar settlement and spent every penny on forty acres of land in northern Minnesota.

There was no house; no one had ever had a house on this land. My stepfather built a one-room tar-paper shack, and we lived in it while he and my mother built us a house from scrap wood and trees they cut down with the help of my brother, my sister, and me. We moved into the new house on Halloween night. Just before she died, she was thinking about becoming a costume designer, or a professor of history. She was profoundly interested in the American pioneers, the consciousness of animals, and the murders of women believed to be witches. She was looking into graduate school, though she feared that she was too old.

To prepare, she shadowed me during my senior year of high school, doing all the homework that I was assigned.

She photocopied my assignment sheets, wrote the papers I had to write, read the books. My mother was a shaky student at best. She died on a Monday during spring break of our senior year. After her funeral, I immediately went back to school because she had begged me to do so. It was the beginning of a new quarter. In most of my classes, we were asked to introduce ourselves and say what we had done over the break. I lied not to protect myself, but because it would have been rude not to. General Comment This is a great ballad!!

I was blown away when I heard this song for the first time and it wasn't Queen, but a Scorpions cover, ref: Acoustica CD, track I think the song is about a strong, but broken relationship The feeling of abandonment comes with great sorrow and pain Wheter it was about being best friends or lovers really doesn't matter can anyone define the difference anyway? She stayed with him till the end. General Comment Wow what a romantic song. Only Freddie Mercury could conceive something as grand as this.

I think that the world more and more realizes just how incredible Queen and Freddie Mercury were. Yes, I know he was gay, but he lived with Mary for several years, and in interviews said she was the "love of his life. She cared for him when he was dying. He left her the bulk of his estate in his will. She is the first person he lists in his dedications for the album "Barcelona" which he did without Queen.

This is a magnificent song and a great backstory. General Comment absolutly beautiful song!!!! General Comment This song is so much fun! General Comment I respect the perosn in this song for still loving the person, after they hurt them! Long live the King of Classic Rock!!! Log in now to add this track to your mixtape! We do not have any tags for Love Of My Life lyrics. Why not add your own? Log in to add a tag. SongMeanings is a place for discussion and discovery.

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