Penny and I were each privileged to have previously been married to individuals who were gracious, joyful, affectionate, talented, passionate, and caring. Consequently, when the two of us took our wedding vows earlier this year, we were not only willing to bring into our union the love, veneration, and, not least, the longings that Penny maintained for her husband Don, who died in 2009, and that I held for my wife Julie, who died in 1999, but were, in fact, resolute about doing so.
Neither of us, you see, was then – or is now – willing to forsake the treasures we accumulated from years of cherishing and being cherished for the numbing anesthesia of an obliterated memory.
So, while Penny and I occasionally find it awkward to realize we miss someone we never met, that seems a small price to pay for a home resonant with feelings from our past liaisons as well as our own present relationship.
And more than ever, our song of songs for who we are now and who we have been in the past has become Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me To The End Of Love.
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I've written about the strange story of how Julie and I came together - see Julie Showalter FAQ
And We’re Still Making Love In My Secret Life - A Video For Julie: The poignant “In My Secret Life” by Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson is the soundtrack for a series of images of my life with Julie, my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily talented and sexy wife, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier.
At 7:00 on the morning of December 3, 1999, in the bed we shared, Julie Showalter, my beloved, fiercely smart, wickedly sexy wife, died from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier.
… I never had a chance. I was – and this is the only word that fits – smitten. She was overwhelmingly intelligent and quick-witted, although it took three more years for me to recognize that she was, in fact, much smarter than me, and then another two years to forgive her for that. And, she was surpassingly good-looking, with an unmistakable aura of sexiness. The unlikely story of how Julie and I fell in love and - 2 husbands, 1 wife, and 2 careers later - spent an outrageously wonderful 20 years together is unlike anything else you will find in this blog, and perhaps anywhere else. The story starts, appropriately, at This Is How A Love Story Began
This is one of the especially felicitous lines from the letters Julie, the woman with whom I had an outrageously happy 20 year marriage prior to her death in 1999, wrote to me over 30 years ago. How could I resist falling in love — and staying in love – with someone who could transform even my psychoanalytic jargon into something charming and sexy? Of course, those gratifyingly frequent descriptions, limned in graphic detail, of intimidatingly ambitious carnal acts she envisioned, didn’t hurt. Reading Julie’s Letters On Our Anniversary
