Did we love each other well? Grieving your first love

This story is part of the November 9 edition of Good Weekend.See all 11 stories.

My first love, Daniel, is dying. The cancer has returned, and the prognosis is not good. He has about six months to live, two years at the most.

I’m in Melbourne on business, and I meet an old friend at a pub. She has heard the news from a mutual friend but she is not a good ­gossip and she hasn’t retained the detail. What kind of cancer, what treatment? How is he feeling? “I’m sorry, darling, all I know is it’s something to do with men’s bits,” she says. “I thought you would want to know.”

I don’t react, not then. I utter a few words of condolence and the conversation moves on. But I turn the news over in my mind all ­evening. What kind of cancer could it be? Not prostate, surely. It’s an older man’s disease. It feels strange to even consider it.

Even in absentia, Daniel has been a constant presence in my life. He will turn 50 in a few months. There is heat behind my eyes but no tears. I have cauterised my heart so many times to heal it of my love for him; only scar tissue remains and it is numb to the touch. It takes some days to work through what I am feeling. Sadness – for him and his family. Wonder – at the finality of death, and how it brings all possible conversations, all potential actions, to an end. And grief, still, after all these years, for the break-up, the rupture, the shared life we never had.

I think of the times we have crossed paths in recent years. Two friends’ weddings. The ­occasional email. Our last exchange was a few days before his second child was born. Why then? He was reflecting, I think, on having a new baby in the house, and how difficult it must be for me to raise my twin sons alone. No one aspires to be a single ­parent. How could we have known then how our lives would turn out?

I know the names of his school-aged children, but I have never met them. And him? Would I recognise him if I saw him on the street? He is not on social media and I don’t know what he does for work. He was a talented artist, but it didn’t pay. Last I heard, he was working in a bottle-o. In my mind, he is still young and handsome, with long blond hair, as long as mine. Sometimes, at the beach, I imagine I see him, with the other young men hunched over their station wagons, scanning the surf. I have to remind myself that it’s not him – that we will never be that young again. We are now old enough to be their parents.

Did we love each other well? For a time, we did. But life got the better of us.

In the strangest of ways, I see pieces of him in my own young children. They have none of his DNA, but we were intertwined for so long. Like two saplings who grew side by side into ­adulthood. It’s because of him that I drive a European car, that I love red wine, that I am a lifelong devotee of Paul Simon. When I see my sons drawing Bugattis in their sketchpads, I think of him and the drawings of Italian sports cars taped to his childhood bedroom walls. When I give my boys instruction in the gospel according to Saint Paul Simon, I wonder whether Daniel’s children have inherited his beautiful voice.

I wonder how he remembers me. I am no longer the lithe young woman he fell in love with. Towards the end of our relationship, when I was in my mid-20s, he painted my ­portrait. After we broke up, he offloaded the painting, an oil in black-and-white, at a friend’s mother’s house. I had to collect it and lug it back to my parents’ place. It sat in their garage for years before I took it home with me.

I thought my children might like it, but I’ve never hung it. It depicts a young woman with a pensive expression, without the wisdom or guidance to know that the decisions of her mid-20s could have consequences for the rest of her life. Daniel called the portrait Erin Fades From View. He was always so much wiser than me.

Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield writes that the question someone asks at the end of their life is: did I love well?

Did we love each other well? For a time, we did. He taught me how to touch, how to feel, how to laugh. But life got the better of us. I wanted to see how green the grass was on the other side. Not very green, as it turns out. I’ve never loved anyone more, or been loved more by anyone, since.

It’s about 15 months later that I hear he has died of prostate cancer. Passed away in the early hours of the morning, surrounded by his wife and family. Only a night earlier, I’d dreamt of him. We kissed and laughed, and he was happy and so was I. When I awoke, something in me had changed. The sadness I had carried for so many years seemed to have lifted. Something about that dream told me the end was close. One day ­exactly, as it turns out.

When I finally cry, my tears are not just for him. They are also for his children and mine, and his grieving family, and lives half-lived, and the joy and anguish of the journey.

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