Despite death, finally finding love made life worth it for new widow

By David McElroy · September 5, 2011

Laura’s face was covered in pain, but she never let herself cry. I’ve known her for more than a decade, but I’d never known her to be happy until the past year. After a previous marriage in which she was misunderstood and lonely, she had finally found real love. Now she was telling me that Daniel was dead.

It’s a raw slice of life that I don’t see very often, so I found it both moving and painful to talk with Laura Sunday afternoon. Her husband of barely more than a year had been dead for a couple of weeks from an auto accident, but I was just finding out about it. Things like this always affect me, but not nearly as much as it affected Laura.

“All my life, I’d been looking for love and I was lucky to find it,” she said. “I was searching all my life, but I don’t regret the wasted years now, because I don’t feel like I lived for nothing. Before Daniel, I felt like, ‘Why am I here?’ Now, it’s different. I fulfilled my dreams and accomplished the love I wanted. There’s nothing I really want to live for now.”

I asked her what she finds herself thinking about the most right now as she’s dealing with the grief.

“We were best friends, so I’m thinking about everything,” Laura said. “I never stop thinking about him for a single second. There might be a few times at work when I get busy enough that I forget for a minute, but every other second, it’s on my mind. I go to sleep with tear and wake up with tears. I think about how close we were to each other. And I’m constantly thinking that I can’t lie next to him and put my head on his chest anymore.”

The experience of finding love with Daniel has changed Laura. Even in the wake of his death, she seems happier to me than she used to be. I asked her whether her divorce had been this bad.

“When I was going through my divorce, I felt like a failure and I thought about what people were thinking about me, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as this,” she said. “I felt so lonely and miserable, like my life had no meaning — and I had the feeling that I had no reason for being here. When I was married to Ben [her first husband], he was a great provider and he meant well, but I was miserable, because we didn’t have that deep heart connection everyone wants. I felt like I had no purpose and nobody needed me. But now it’s different. I feel like I accomplished what I wanted. I found the love I’d been looking for, and that makes all the difference.”

I asked her what she would tell other people she had learned — things she might have wished she could have known without learning it this difficult way.

“People live without thinking about how fragile life is and they don’t appreciate things they have,” she said. “I’m a woman. To me, the most important thing has been to have real love. For some people, maybe it’s not that important. To me, it was very important to find. People sometimes find real love and don’t appreciate it. They think their house or work or other people’s opinions are so important. But compared to love, those things don’t matter. I’ve just realized how fragile our lives are. You can be here one moment and then be gone any second. Without love, there will be regrets. Now I don’t have those regrets.”

She said she thinks about the child they were trying to have and wonders what that part of life might have been like if Daniel had lived.

“Nobody knew this, but we had started the process for in vitro fertilization,” she said. “We had been trying ever since we married, but it wasn’t happening, so we were going to do it another way. We really wanted a baby together. I had already had my first appointment just before the accident. I was supposed to be pregnant in no more than three to six months.”

Laura also said losing Daniel has affected how she felt about her own death. She’s still in her 30s, but she repeatedly expressed an eagerness for the end of life.

“Before this happened, I was afraid of death,” she said. “Now, I’m not afraid anymore. I’m just not afraid. The only thing I’m worried about at this moment are my family responsibilities and my business, because people are counting on me. So I do still have to help them. Other than that, I’m not afraid to die. I’m ready.”

She expressed the confident belief that she would see Daniel again after death. She has strong Christian faith and knows her husband will be waiting for her when she dies.

“Love is something you can’t explain and you can’t understand fully,” Laura said. “I can’t explain this kind of love, what I have for Daniel. I just know he filled my needs and God put him into my life. From my point of view, this is the purpose of life — to find this kind of real love. Lots of people live their whole lives and never find it, so I was lucky. In my opinion, if you don’t find that, it’s almost like a wasted life. So my life wasn’t wasted. And that’s why it doesn’t matter anymore how much longer I live. I found what I was looking for.”

Note: The names and a couple of minor details have been changed in this story to conceal the identities of the people involved.

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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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