Cinco…DeMarco

The moon belongs to everyone

The best things in life are free

The stars belong to everyone

They gleam there for you and for me

The flowers in spring, the robins that sing

The moonbeams that shine

They're yours, they're mine

And love can come to everyone

The best things in life are free

(Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson)

Eight years ago today, on a quiet beach in Maui, my wife Libby and I gazed into each other’s eyes, shared our wedding vows, and transformed Cinco de Mayo into Cinco DeMarco.

It’s been an incomparable season of love, birthed in middle age, with this brilliant, beautiful woman. I wondered most of my life if I would ever experience a romantic relationship with this level of deep friendship, loyalty, and easily-flowing adoration. I feel an additional love spike each time I look into her eyes, each time she smiles at me, each time she lets loose one of her genuine, deep belly laughs.

Both of us had to trek through a lot of thick sand to get to that wedding shore. Broken marriages. Relationships that started off promising and either fizzled with time or ended in trainwrecks. Parenting difficulties. Therapy. Self-esteem issues. Health challenges. Starting over, or close-to-over, financially.

And we’ve had other sands to navigate since those beachside vows. Blending a family of not just daughters but cats who didn’t always get along and sometimes shit or pissed outside of the litter box boxes. Seeking congruence between nurturing our marriage and trying to be good co-parents with our former spouses. Helping each other face and problem-solve various health issues for ourselves and family members. Comforting each other when grieving the deaths of loved ones. Brainstorming together and supporting each other during difficult career moments and decisions.  

I’ve done more pleasure traveling during our marriage than all of my previous decades combined, visiting places together that I’d longed to see such as Rome, Florence, Barcelona, and the French coast. We spent a magical time in Aruba before getting engaged, and have enjoyed domestic visits to the Oregon coast, New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and—multiple times—our likely future home of Asheville, North Carolina. 

Sometimes I catch myself astonished that Libby continues to be so kind to me, day in and day out. The embedded layer of me that learned to expect the opposite is a stubborn, slow-to-heal wound. 

This wound is a close cousin to my most painful dynamic, which is grieving the “lost” time with my daughters in the aftermath of divorce and some choices I made that weren’t in their best interests. I daydream about a world in which I handled those things differently, in which I never broke my daughter’s tender hearts. It takes constant vigilance and daily practices of gratitude to stay focused on the present and the father I am today, the choices and possibilities that abound now, to continue to foster a loving, supportive relationship with my now-adult daughters and old soul stepdaughter. 

As I lean into gratitude, I’m humbled by the unquantifiable stream of causes-and-effects that had to unfold for me to meet and fall in love with Libby in the first place. Spontaneously signing up for a dating app and then getting matched with Libby right away. Our first date that almost didn’t happen due to scheduling challenges. Meeting during a short window when neither of us were in relationships. 

Tweak any of those circumstances just a little and there’s a strong chance that Libby and I might have never met.

I wouldn’t have known exactly who I was missing, but the nagging, intuitive sense of missing someone would likely have remained. We also broke up for a week or so early in our relationship (SPOILER ALERT: It was my own damn fault) and I fought with everything I had to earn her back, against the odds, and had things gone the other way I most definitely would have known exactly who I was missing.

“Luck,” I once heard Oprah Winfrey say, “is preparation meeting opportunity.” (The origin of that statement is sometimes attributed to the Roman philosopher Seneca but is also cited as a loose strand of folk wisdom.)

Preparation is usually in our control, but opportunity can be random and unpredictable. I know plenty of people in middle age who have been steadily working on themselves, growing and learning, and haven’t yet had the good fortune to meet their “person.” Some aren’t necessarily looking, having found deep contentment in their rich inner lives and their circle of family members and friends, seeing themselves as complete and whole.  

I long for Libby and I to have a few more decades together, to get as much time together as possible given that we started off in midlife. I have no idea how many more trips around the sun we’ll actually get and I try to push that out of my mind and stay present with loving her, laughing with her, crying with her, dreaming with her, planning with her.

If someday I am widowed I will most likely travel along a “post-relationship” shore of my remaining years, no longer needing or wanting another romantic partner. I will have experienced a rare kind of love that usually happens once for someone if at all and will carry that love in my heart and mind, alongside my unimaginable grief. 

I will be content and complete in myself. I’ll continue to learn and grow, to travel as my health permits, to (of course) write and write and write some more. 

To live the simple and minimalist life toward which I’ve always felt drawn, owning mostly books, the right amount of clothes, a tiny amount of furniture, and the smallest possible home I can find.

To float in the ocean and gaze at stars and try my best, even when I’m at my worst, to offer a little bit of kindness each day to a few other people.

At least that’s what I intend to do. Preparation is no guarantee of opportunity.