Love, Again by Eve Pell

Author:Eve Pell [Pell, Eve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7647-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-26T16:00:00+00:00

Dusty and Dorothy

JUST FOR TODAY

Unlike Sam and me, who didn’t have specific discussions about our relationship once we were together, or Aggie and Jack, who maintain an intimate, spirited, and loving connection guided by their instincts and countercultural values, other couples plan specific strategies to keep their relationships on track and their hearts in sync.

They go to workshops on successful communication. They engage in daily spiritual practices of prayer and meditation to keep themselves focused on their best selves and each other. Perhaps because they wish to avoid mistakes they made in the past, they work on making this relationship joyful and strong.

In early 2009, a year after they became a couple, Dusty and Dorothy went on a Valentine’s Day retreat for lesbian pairs titled “Live Love Laugh Learn.” While on the retreat, Dusty proposed to Dorothy. Soon after their wedding, they faced trial after trial as health problems afflicted them both. On their honeymoon Dusty tried to yank a kayak around and injured her neck. Then Dorothy contracted a staph infection; several weeks later she developed a terrifying illness in which numbness spread through her body. Then Dusty needed a knee replacement, and she later came down with a virus that impaired her hearing and sense of balance.

“It was like a rehearsal for old age,” said Dusty. “You want to know how that other person is going to be, and I think for people who have been married for decades, you hope that the partner will be there. For me, one of the scary things about us getting involved is that I am eight years older than Dorothy. I have a vivid imagination and was imagining the worst.”

Dorothy believes that being married helped them. “You just feel that commitment, that devotion, that foundation,” she said. They learned something about their own comfort zones—what was too close and what felt right. One of their friends noted that both women were caretakers and wondered how that would play out between them. Dusty spoke about the issue: “I think both of us have learned what the signals are to hover and when we don’t want the other one to hover we can say that and talk about it. We have a very easy time now.”

Dusty added, “Now we are healthy; we can go dancing, we can hike. We hover over each other a little bit.” They smiled at each other.

Dorothy saw it this way: “The flip side of that is that Dusty is a whole person and that frees me to be a whole person. I don’t spend my days on guard watching for her every need. When I notice that there is a need I want to be there. I feel that I am more whole and more free to be me because I know we are both there for each other—it is a very different thing from in the past.”

Illness brought new dimensions to their lives. Because they had to go through several medical crises and look after each other, they found that caretaking was something they liked to do.

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