© The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon
By Paul Denison
The Register-Guard
EDITOR’S NOTE: Longtime Register-Guard editor and reporter Paul Denison is taking early retirement to leave the country. At the urging of his editors, he agreed to share the story behind his departure.
Love can lurk in the darkest places.
One year after my wife died - and a week or two after a brief but scary health crisis of my own - I stood one autumn evening on the footbridge at Valley River Center, looking down at a dead salmon in the shallows, thinking that my life, too, might end soon. And not really caring.
Judy died on Aug. 31, 2002, less than a month shy of our 35th anniversary. Her passing came as no surprise to either of us after her long, courageous struggle with cancer. She went away quietly and calmly, at home in her own bed, as she wished.
Our devastated kids came home quickly, my daughter from South Africa and my son from Boston, with their spouses. With them and a small group of close friends, we went to the coast just to spend a day together near the sea, which Judy had loved as only a native Nebraskan could.
Paul Denison and Monica in a snapshot from Kibbutz Gazit, Israel, in 1964. The couple, reconnected over the Internet, will marry and live in Sweden.
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That Sunday morning, as we all walked to church together, I kept looking back at the motel, wondering what was keeping Judy.
After a week off, I went back to work. For the next two years or so, I showed no outward signs of grief. I did my work as an arts and entertainment reporter, spent two Saturdays each month as a volunteer exhibit interpreter at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, went to church almost every Sunday. Every familiar thing I did, and the memory-rich house in which I continued to live, gave me both comfort and pain.
Somewhere during this time, I heard a line from a song that seemed to describe my situation: “My life goes on forlornly.” And in a movie that I saw several times, “The Hours,” I also heard Meryl Streep speak a line that seemed to sum up what I was doing: “We stay alive for each other.” In this case, for my grieving children and my widowed mother.
In time, I came to some sense of equanimity, aided by long walks on the beach, resigning myself to a quiet, solitary life. I had a good job in a good community and, on occasional Sunday mornings at a bagel shop in Depoe Bay, an ad hoc support group called the Circle of Abuse.
I had been working for The Register-Guard for more than 20 years, and retirement was not that far off. I could just coast the rest of the way.
I began to renew acquaintances with women friends from way back, and for a few bewildering months even thought I was in love. I read that “grief is having nowhere to put your love,” and my son and daughter helped me realize that I needed to be careful about where that impulse might lead me.
Ever since Judy died, I had been emotionally numb. Now the anesthetic was wearing off.
My co-workers had little or no clue about all this. I’ve always been a private person, and the Howard Johnson of journalists: no surprises.
Then something happened that surprised me and everyone close to me. Blame Google.
One day in July 2004, I typed in the name of a woman I had met in Israel in 1964. We had dug potatoes on one kibbutz, gone on a student bus tour of the country and picked apples at a second kibbutz. We were inseparable friends.
But at summer’s end, we did separate. We corresponded off and on for two years, but we both got married and lost track of each other. But I remembered her married name, and when I Googled, there she was, just like that, after 40 years.
Monica is a scientist, and what popped up was her research group’s Web page. It included a picture of her with an infant in her arms. Beneath the photo was her e-mail address. I quickly sent off a brief message, asking whether she was the Monica I had known at Lehavot Haviva and Gazit.
There was no reply. I figured either this wasn’t my friend, or she had chosen not to answer.
I learned later that when my e-mail reached Monica’s office, she was on vacation. At her family’s summer place, one of her sisters had picked up an old copy of John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley” and noticed a note inside: fall 1964 from Paul. “Who’s this Paul?” she asked.
When Monica returned to work in August, my e-mail was waiting for her. She almost trashed it as spam. Then she opened it, read it and replied: “Yes, Paul, it’s me.”
Much has happened since. Monica and I spent two weeks together last fall, and another week together in December, and another week in April. I met her sisters, brothers-in-law, daughter, son-in-law and granddaughters, Mira and Nora.
We have traded e-mails almost daily for more than 10 months, and we talk frequently on the phone. We’re engaged to be married. We have been since Oct. 26, 2004, just a few days after we saw each other for the first time in 40 years.
She was 62, and I was 61, but we made that major life decision in just a few seconds, like giddy teenagers.
Except that there was, and is, nothing giddy about this. Through our e-mails and our visits - including the first one, when we spent hours arranging the letters we had written to each other in 1964-66 and reading many of them out loud to each other - Monica and I had discovered that despite the years and the different paths we had taken, we fit together “like two halves of an apple,” as she puts it. Like twin souls reuniting in the ripeness of time.
Monica and I intuitively knew where our relationship was headed even before we met last fall. To family and friends it may have seemed impulsive; but this was actually one of the most carefully considered, and clearest, decisions of my life.
We realize that we might not have lasted as a couple through the turbulent years of our growing up, but now - now was different. Here were two mature individuals, both alone but strong enough to accept this as a fact of our declining years, knowing without doubt or hesitation that we belong together. Not only because our common interests had survived and deepened, but because the instinctive affection, respect and trust we had so long ago was still there, springing up like dormant seed after a forest fire. And there is fire in this relationship, not just warmth to see us through long winter nights.
There will be long winter nights in our lives, literally if not figuratively. Monica was born and raised in Finland and lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, where we’ll live. We hope. Since January of this year, we’ve been waiting for the Swedish immigration authority to decide whether they really need another American taking up permanent residence.
That long, slow process appears to be almost over. As I write this, Monica is answering a list of 82 questions from Migrationsverket and gathering photos and documents to prove that our relationship is real.
We’ve convinced both our families - hers instantly delighted, mine initially dubious and dismayed - and we’re confident that the migration board will do the right thing. We obviously need their stamp of approval - but then again, we don’t. We’re sure of our love.
Friends have asked me if I’m apprehensive about retiring, moving to another country, getting married, learning a new language. Mildly so, perhaps. But I’m far more afraid of what would happen if I ignored my deepest feelings and stayed in my shrinking comfort zone. Going forward without Monica has become unthinkable.
Today is my last day at The Register-Guard, after 21 years as a reporter and editor. On Friday, I’ll leave for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, not to review plays this time but just to spend Father’s Day and my daughter’s birthday with my kids in a place that’s special to our family.
In a magazine just the other day I ran across a quotation from Martin Buber: “Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I like the sound of it. Could this late love of ours be the secret destination of a journey that began 40 years ago in Lower Galilee?
On June 30, I’ll board a plane for Helsinki, Finland, where Monica and I will spend the summer in her family’s summer place by the sea, waiting for the green light for me to enter Sweden and begin a new life that neither she nor I expected, or even knew we wanted.