I Loved Someone That Didn't Love Me
Nearly 10 years. Sweet words, sweet love, laughs, good times, Valentine's and birthday cards.
Then...a pack a day of Marlboro lights caught up with him. Lung cancer. Advanced when diagnosed. Inoperable.
He died 11 months from diagnosis. A couple of days before he passed away, he told me he loved me, still clutching a cigarette in his frail emaciated hand.
Within a minute of receiving the news of his death, I found out that right before he died, he'd gone to the resort town where he and I had spent a romantic weekend and married the woman he'd been seeing for some time behind my back. On my birthday.
She was the respectable widow. I was now just a backstreet girl. She did not invite me to the funeral. No one called to ask how I was doing.
Cried for 3 months, could not go to work. His loss and betrayal gutted me. Finally, ran out of money, went back to work, developed new appreciation for the job I had not liked and learned to love it because it distracted me.
This is not something you "get over." You accept it, learn to live with it somehow. Life goes on. But nothing is ever the same.
I still visit his grave now and then. But I don't yell curses at it or cry anymore. The last time I went there I left a handprinted sign taped to his grave marker:
WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST QUIT SMOKING?
Then...a pack a day of Marlboro lights caught up with him. Lung cancer. Advanced when diagnosed. Inoperable.
He died 11 months from diagnosis. A couple of days before he passed away, he told me he loved me, still clutching a cigarette in his frail emaciated hand.
Within a minute of receiving the news of his death, I found out that right before he died, he'd gone to the resort town where he and I had spent a romantic weekend and married the woman he'd been seeing for some time behind my back. On my birthday.
She was the respectable widow. I was now just a backstreet girl. She did not invite me to the funeral. No one called to ask how I was doing.
Cried for 3 months, could not go to work. His loss and betrayal gutted me. Finally, ran out of money, went back to work, developed new appreciation for the job I had not liked and learned to love it because it distracted me.
This is not something you "get over." You accept it, learn to live with it somehow. Life goes on. But nothing is ever the same.
I still visit his grave now and then. But I don't yell curses at it or cry anymore. The last time I went there I left a handprinted sign taped to his grave marker:
WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST QUIT SMOKING?
70-79, F
