The Romance of Helen Trent

The Romance of Helen Trent

I am standing at the ocean’s edge, and the water turns back on itself, and flows back to where it came from. We are all part of the continuum of life’s stream.

If that is true, why do I find myself gasping for breath?

Why this darkness?

I feel as though I am in a hypnagogic film.

Alone.

Solitary.

Abandoned.

A flock of sandpipers suddenly appears, and they bring redemptive grace.

I am able to regulate my breathing.

As I walk along the shore, I am reminded of my David.

My struggle to breathe has been a new phenomenon since he passed away. I have mini panic attacks daily. For the first time I fully understood how terrifying it must have been for David to be gasping for breath as a little boy. He told me early on in our relationship that asthma had stamped the diagnosis of” failure” upon him by the time he was five years old. His older brothers were rugged-hale- and hearty, and dear David was bedbound.

What was the name of the radio show he listened to (with his mother) as he was resting on the couch, in January 1943, in Cleveland, Ohio?

Something Helen?

Yes!

The Romance of Helen Trent!

Some silly radio soap opera that espoused romance for women over the age of thirty-five.

He told me how he loved watching his mother giggle and gasp as she listened to the foolish escapades of Helen Trent, all the while concentrating on her knitting.

Thinking of that just now provides another opening as to who he was- why he was drawn to the feminine, why he became a “rescuer” - first as a young seminarian, devoted to the Catholic Church and then as a clinical psychologist.

I was the first woman he cared about that he didn’t feel he needed to rescue. I carried that badge of honor with pride. But death makes fools of us all. Since David’s passing, all I have done is made plea bargains with an absent God to let me be with him. I cannot live like this anymore. I need to be rescued! Please David, save me from this life! I need you!

I have vivid fantasies of running to him in an open meadow, to be rewarded at the end, by his grabbing me with his strong arms, wrapping me in a tight embrace and laughing. “You made it, Mavourneen!”

As that fantasy ends, a stray dog swishes his way over to me, tennis ball in his mouth, tail wagging, hopeful.

I say,” Ok, drop it, why don’t you?” and he does, and I grab it and toss it into the sea.

Watching him run to fetch the ball causes a tsunami of memories of David throwing balls to various dogs over the years…. All my thoughts of David are like missiles sailing in from different directions to pierce my soul.

His unlikely appearance in my life shaped the contours of my destiny on that fateful day in April 1998.

I was running off copies for the weekly staff meeting when I suddenly felt a hand on my forearm- I hadn’t heard anyone approach- and I immediately let out a loud yelp in fear- and there- standing next to me- was this handsome man in a blue suit, with deep blue eyes who backed away and stated:” Oh my dear, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. Surely you do not work here? May I be so bold as to ask if you are real?”

And without skipping a beat, I responded: “Surely I am real. And I don’t know what mushrooms you have ingested or cocaine you may have snorted, but who the hell are you?”,

And he calmly told me: “I am a man whose life is changing at this very moment.” And he proceeded to walk away, down the long corridor to a bank of offices that were empty, due to the early hour.

I wanted to follow him, but pride kept me from doing so.

I never knew what the word “swoon” meant till that moment.

And an hour later, as I began our staff meeting, the President of the Board introduced the new doctor to the team- Dr. David Sullivan.

The bold, handsome copy machine man tilted his head towards me and winked at me as he stood up and gave a quick speech.

I don’t remember one word that he said.

But I felt his charming authenticity embroider itself into my being.

By December of that same year, the copy machine man and I were married.

It was a whirlwind of love from day one.

The affective valence of the way he first held me calibrated who I was meant to be.

His eyes, his laugh, his touch, his words are all uniquely instantiated into my soul.

And there are no guidebooks on what to do when the electrifying lover, the mountain of a man, your world, your rock, your everything- has ceased to live.

I want to know him from cradle to grave, to honor him and that is why I thought of him on that couch as a little boy.

Did he not know that I was going to come to help regulate his breathing?

Did he not know that the woman he finally fell in love with would be over thirty-five years old, just like Helen Trent?

Did he not know that I was going to come and take away the birds’ nest of anxieties that plagued him?

Did he not know that as I was being born, and he was graduating from high school, the gods were constructing the ultimate spaceship called love?

Did he not know that I was going to hold him close to my heart every single night, from June 1998 until April 2024?

Did he not know that we would swim like swans every summer for twenty-six years?

Did he not know that we would laugh hysterically at our grandchildren’s antics as they careened and hollered down snowy hillsides in winter?

Did he not know that we would sing “Oklahoma where the wind comes whistling down the plain “to each other as we planted our first tomatoes every spring in the backyard?

Did he not know that I would bake his favorite fruit pies every week during the last few months of his life?

Did he not know that I would crawl into his hospice bed every night to hold him and assure him that we were always going to be together, that I would not leave him?

Did he not know that I would keep the last Klondike bar in the freezer for him till I die?

Did he not know that death would not prevent my swooning for him?

Did he not know that even after his death, my body’s music sings for him only?

Did he not know that my eyes would continue to seek his on the ocean’s horizon every single day?

Did he not know that my wrinkled hands would clasp together in prayer that he be at peace?

Did he not know that my heart beats only for him?

These thoughts forge a plumage of elegiac exhaustion and joy.

All I can do is say “Thank you, David Sullivan, for it all.”

And David?

Are you reading this?

I found the opening words to your asthma riddled soap opera!

“And now, The Romance of Helen Trent, the real- life drama of Helen Trent, who when life mocks here, breaks her hopes, dashes her against rocks of despair, fights back bravely, successfully, to prove what so many women long to prove, that because a woman is 35 or more, romance in life need not be over, that romance can begin at 35.”

Aww, David.

I love you. I carry your heartbeat in mine forever. Romance with you is my still point in this turning world.

Be well.

Be safe.

Wait for me.

As I throw the soggy tennis ball back into the sea for this stray pup, I can hear you, David:

“I am a man whose life is changing at this very moment.”