Love or money?

I have a regular customer who comes in fairly often. This man is in his 70's and is one of the happiest men I've ever met. Yesterday he came into the bar and the familiar smile and warm compliments he usually offered everyone were absent. I brought him his usual tall bud light and shot of jack without asking for his order and placed it in front of him. As I walked away I felt his hand grab mine, when I looked into his eyes I saw true sadness. His hand trembled as a tear followed the wrinkles of his cheeks before falling onto the bar top. Neither of us said anything. He released my hand and sat silent, sipping his beer. 

As the night drew to an end and most of the bar patrons had gone home to sleep away their buzz the man would pull an old picture from his wallet and weep. I pulled a stool beside him, placed my hand on his and asked if he needed to talk about whatever was causing his pain.  His story overwhelmed me, it made me go to a place in my mind that I just wasn't prepared to go. It hit home and was eerily close to something I'm facing.

This was his story.

Erin, I'm wealthy. I have more money than I'll ever spend in two lifetimes. I chased success, I chased a career, I chased money. I fixated on it, it consumed me. 

I nodded in understanding. 

Was I happy? Yes and no, I never wanted for anything, but I sacrificed something more precious than anything in the world to achieve all of this. 

Tears welled in his eyes and his gaze shifted; you could see he had gone somewhere else in his mind and for a few moments we sat silent until he turned and looked deep into my eyes. 

I fell in love once, he smiled through his pain. I found this woman, she was incredible. She was smart, sexy, fun, had a laugh that made the heavens shine. She was kind and gentle, but firm when it was needed. She made me feel calm and whole. She was fiery, had a temper, and we fought about a lot of things, but at the end of the day I wanted nothing more than to have her in my arms because she loved me with a fierceness I had never felt before. She had this passion for life that was mesmerizing and her eyes held so many fascinating secrets. 

During that relationship I was faced with a choice, pursue my career and gain wealth or choose to love and live life with her. Many people told me to chase money. You can always find love everywhere you go, they'd say. I did exactly that, I left her crying, confused, and hurt. Eventually she moved. Over time I noticed the sting from losing her never left and to dull that I would spend more time at work, drink too much, make more money to buy more things to try to fill the void left by her absence. I dated a lot of women, but no one came close to her. No one ever fulfilled me the way she did. In a way she had broken me. I had four marriages fail before I realized I just wouldn't find her in another woman. 

About ten years ago I looked her up, I found she had moved back to Utah after her husband passed away. We reconnected and even after all those years that passionate love was still there. I was able to spend a year with her, laughing with her, holding her, loving her before cancer took her from me. 

You know those people, the friends that told me to chase money. Those people were wrong. They were so horribly and devastatingly wrong. I could have spent my entire life with her. I could have spent every night holding her as she fell asleep. I could have heard her tell me how much she loved me every morning as the sun woke us. I could have spent every day loving her, but instead I chose money and it destroyed me. 

He took both of my hands in his and squeezed them tightly. Erin, don't you listen to them. Don't you ever listen. Don't you ever give up on love. If you find someone like her, you never give that up. You can find money everywhere you go, but you can never replace a love like that. 

I'm still affected by what he said, by the sadness in his voice and the pain in his eyes. It made my heart long for someone to love me the way he loved her.

Words that haunt me

I had a friend kill herself years ago and sometimes my brain likes to replay the scenario in my mind as I sleep. This is the bit that seems to stick in my mind.

In truth I knew she was sad, I could feel it. Even when she tried to hide it I could see the sadness in her eyes. Several times I told her I was there, but I never really was there, was I? No, I was too busy dealing with my own problems to listen to hers. I knew she desperately needed someone to talk to, but I felt it wasn’t MY JOB to pull it out of her so I left it to someone else, but everyone else felt the same way I did. No one wanted to be responsible for helping her, we were all too busy. Something she said to me a few days before she died still haunts me, she mentioned how odd it is that people are so disconnected these days; How everyone knows when something’s wrong, but we’re all too wrapped up in our selfish lives that we refuse to see the shit when we’re standing in it. And on the rare occasion when we do see it, we just brush it aside and hope someone else will step in it after us, and that will then obligate them to clean it up.

We’re all standing in shit, aren’t we?

I dreamt of her last night and as I was walking through the park I replayed those words over and over, "we're all standing in shit, aren't we?" I couldn't silence them, I couldn't ignore them.

I met a nice man at the park today. He was feeding the ducks as I sat on the park bench near the big pond. He came over to pet my Lilo and talk to me. Everyone else had successfully ignored him as well as the rest of the homeless people wandering around, but I found him to not be a threat and let him sit and talk with me. He was gentle and kind and Lilo took to him immediately. After learning he had fought wars, raised a son and then lost that son to war he mentioned to me that he was hungry, tired, scared, and alone all the time. I asked him why he fed the ducks the bread that he could be eating and he said to me, "I'd rather feel good about something I've done than have a belly full of bread. The ducks don't need the bread, but that little girl over there laughed for 10 minutes as the ducks swarmed around her while I shared the bread with them. A smile, laughter, a kind word, those are all worth losing bread over."

I bought him lunch and thanked him for the smiles and the stories.

Isn't it odd how things play out?