The Notebook

Dear Noah,
I write this letter by candlelight as you lie sleeping in the bedroom we have
shared since the day we were married. I see the flame beside me and it
reminds me of another fire from decades ago, with me in your soft clothes,
and I knew then we would always be together, even though I wavered the
following day. My heart had been captured by a southern poet, and I knew
inside that it had always been yours. Who was I to question a love that rode
on shooting stars and roared like crashing waves? For that is what it was
between us then and that is what it is today.
I remember coming back to you the day after my mother left. I was so scared
because I was sure you would never forgive me for leaving you. I was shaking
as I got out of the car, but you took it all away with your smile. “How about

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some coffee?” was all you said. And you never brought it up again in all our
years together.
Nor did you question me when I would leave and walk alone during the next
few days. When I came in with tears in my eyes, you always knew whether I
needed you to hold me or to just let me be. I don’t know how but you did, and
you made it easier for me. Later, when we went to the small chapel and
exchanged our rings and made our vows, I looked into your eyes and knew I
had made the right decision.
More than that, I knew I was foolish for ever considering someone else. I have
never wavered since.
We had a wonderful life together, and I think about it a lot now. I close my
eyes sometimes and see you with speckles of grey in your hair, sitting on the
porch and playing your guitar while little ones play and clap to the music you
create. “You’re a better father than you know,” I tell you later, after the
children are sleeping.
I love you for many things, especially your passions: love and poetry and
fatherhood and friendship and beauty and nature. And I am glad you have
taught the children these things, for I know their lives are better for it. They
tell me how special you are to them, and it makes me feel like the luckiest
woman alive.
You have taught me as well, and inspired me and supported me in my
painting, and you will never know how much it has meant to me that you were
always there, encouraging me. You understood my need for my own studio,
my own space, and saw beyond the paint on my clothes and in my hair. I know
it was not easy. It takes a man to do that, Noah, to live with something like
that. And you have. For forty-five years now. Wonderful years.
You are my best friend as well as my lover, and I do not know which side of
you I enjoy the most. I treasure each side, just as I have treasured our life
together. You have something inside you, Noah, something beautiful and
strong. Kindness, that’s what I see when I look at you now, that’s what
everyone sees. Kindness.
I know you think me crazy for making us write our story before we finally
leave our home, but I have my reasons and I thank you for your patience. I
never told you why, but now I think it is time you knew. We have lived a
lifetime most couples never know, and when I look at you I am frightened by
the knowledge that all this will be ending soon. For we both know my
prognosis. I worry more about you than I do about me, because I fear the pain
I know you will go through. There are no words to express my sorrow for this.

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