{"id":35258,"date":"2022-03-05T00:01:03","date_gmt":"2022-03-05T08:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=35258"},"modified":"2026-06-06T09:47:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T09:47:00","slug":"our-love-is-immortal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/our-love-is-immortal\/","title":{"rendered":"Widowed: Our Love Is Immortal (Seriously!)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"our<\/a>
Saying our vows in 1977 . . .<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today is our anniversary. Jon and I were married 45 years ago today. Which makes this a good day to revisit a thought I stumbled across earlier this week, which is — Jon may be gone, but our love is immortal.<\/p>\n

No worries. I’m not going to get all cheesy and sentimental here. I won’t be laying any overwrought lyricism on you. I just want to share a helpful thought I had earlier this week. (I was in the shower, where my biggest Big Thoughts tend to lurk, waiting for me to get naked mentally as well as physically.)<\/p>\n

Do We Evaporate Into Nothingness?<\/strong><\/h5>\n

But first a story from my 20s, from before I met Jon. Like most people of any age, I was worried about dying. I didn’t want to do it, but it seemed kind of inevitable. And so far, no one I knew had figured out how to avert mortality. It looked like one day I, too, would evaporate into nothingness.<\/p>\n

I brought the subject up with an older friend. He was a psychiatrist, and, being young, I figured that he — as an older person trained in psychiatry — might have special insights into how to get around this death thing.<\/p>\n

And he did. He actually did.<\/p>\n

“I don’t want to die,” I said.\u00a0 “Do I have to?”<\/p>\n

“Well, yes. You do. And I do too,” he said (in so many words).<\/p>\n

“I’m going to die,” he said. “But here I am, alive right now. I have lived a life and nothing can change that. Nothing can take that away from me. Nothing, not even death, can change the fact that I was here — on this planet, at this particular point in all of time.”<\/p>\n

That helped. And it has helped me over the years. I think of my friend and this bit of wisdom often.<\/p>\n

(He must be dead by now. The Christmas cards I sent to him started coming back as undeliverable a decade or two ago. But, of course, like he said: once upon a time he was<\/em>, and nothing can change that.) And so . . .<\/p>\n

\"our<\/a>
. . . and signing on the dotted line after the ceremony. Wedding photos by Luers.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Just Us<\/strong><\/h5>\n

And so, this week, as the 45th anniversary of marriage with Jon approached, I got to thinking about how the life and the loyalty that Jon and I shared (along with the spats and the tussles) was eternal. Nothing can change the fact of it, not even Jon’s death a year ago. It just is<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There we were, a married couple for 44 years, raising children, remodeling a house, debating where to hang the Navajo rug and whether artichokes for dinner twice in one week was too much artichoke. There we were, nurturing something that most people would call love, but we thought of simply as “us.”<\/p>\n

There we were, doing something that can never be erased. Doing something that moved me to succumb to today’s cornball headline: “Our Love Is Immortal.”<\/p>\n

Because it is.\u00a0Seriously.<\/p>\n

More about those artichokes in last week’s post, “It’s Been a Year, and He’s Still Gone.”<\/a>\u00a0 More about that marriage at “A Marriage Proposal — The Man Said, ‘Yes'”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"our<\/a>
And trying to figure out how to be parents in 1987. Photo by Skip Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"wedding-vows\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jon may be gone, but our love is immortal. Hear me out. I promise I’m not going to get all cheesy and sentimental on you.\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49350,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[103,34,191,2573,29,689],"class_list":["post-35258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-rocky-spiritual-journey","category-widowed","tag-aging","tag-dont-miss","tag-grief","tag-immortal-love","tag-jon","tag-marriage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35258"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49352,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35258\/revisions\/49352"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}