SEEING ME THROUGH YOUR EYES

“What was it like when I wailed in the hospital at the news that Lincoln needed to be put down?” I asked Ray this morning. We don’t often get to see ourselves through the eyes of our beloved. I rarely lose control. I wanted to know what he saw, and how he felt.

“You were traumatized, and you tried to muffle your screaming grief as you pulled on your hair,” Ray said. “I knew not to interrupt it, but my focus was on you.”

“How long did it go on?” I asked.

“A few minutes.”

“I remember you offering to drive us home, but I assured you I was able to drive. I just hated that before we got to see Lincoln and be with him when he was put to sleep, they asked us to pick out a box for his ashes.”

“I knew that I had to make the decision,” Ray said. “You were too upset to think about the ashes.”

“When did you get to express your grief?”

“When we put him down,” he said. While we were sharing so personally about how we experienced the other, I took the opportunity to say, “I often wonder what you’ll miss least about me when I’m gone, and what you’ll miss most.”

“I can’t even go there,” he said.

The conversation about how I looked to him when I was in such untypical, uncontrolled behavior at the hospital was prompted by a medical problem that had resulted.

The persistent lump in my throat, feeling like a golf ball, was ex-rayed, given an ultrasound, and finally a nasal endoscopy.

“Have you had any recent trauma?” the doctor asked.

“When our dog died six weeks ago, I wailed in agony.”

“You damaged your vocal cords, and acid reflux is filling the grooves of the damage.” He handed me a paper that described exactly my condition, and he prescribed an antacid.

Ray and I had a good, teary conversation about missing Lincoln after we lit the candle and incense in his honor today, and in that of a friend’s best friend who had died yesterday.

I know that I don’t see the world through Ray’s eyes nor he through mine. It fascinates me that we’ll be together for 47 years in May and while I think I know him best, and he me, we are two different souls with very different life experiences. And, yet, we grow together by discussing the same meditations each morning, watching the same programs, and often reading the same books. Nevertheless, I want to hear from him periodically about how he witnesses my behavior. I can feel it, but I cannot see it.

“What are my worst or most challenging behaviors? Being bossy? Finishing your sentences?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ray said. “It’s too painful to think about. I’ll miss everything about you.”

Brian McNaught has been an author and educator on LGBTQ issues since 1974. Former Congressman Barney Frank said of Brian, “No one has done a better job of chronicling what it’s like to grow up gay." www.brian-mcnaught.com.