Tag Archives: Julie Showalter

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 miss her every day.

Emotional Arithmetic

Things have changed since Julie died thirteen years ago.¹

December 3, 2012 finds me still in love with Julie, and, indeed, I still miss her every day.  I am also, however, profoundly, unabashedly, recklessly in love with Penny, who became my wife just over a year ago.

And, while my schedule for December 3rd begins, as it has every year since I began blogging, with this commemorative post, obsessing over Julie’s death won’t be my sole occupation today. I will also set up our Christmas tree, pay a few bills, read a novel that is turning out to be better than I expected, respond to the emails that piled up over the weekend, … . I may even post something about Leonard Cohen because, for now, that seems to be what I do.  I’ll spend time with Penny, we’ll plan our holiday activities, we’ll commiserate over the latest crisis caused and consequent grief suffered by my son, and we’ll generally perform whatever daily tasks husbands and wives in our cohort perform around here this time of year.

In addition, we’ll be thinking of Penny’s husband Don, who died in 2009, and Julie.  Having been privileged to have been married to individuals who both happened to be gracious, enchanting, affectionate, talented, lusty, and caring, we tenaciously guard our memories of them, confident that the  joyfulness thus gained far exceeds the pain, however poignant, suffered in the process.

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.

That’s the way the emotional arithmetic works.  Our experiences with Julie and Don are additions to, not losses from our lives as individuals and our life together.

In My Not So Secret Life

There is a certain cognitive dissonance implicit in posting a video called “And We’re Still Making Love In My Secret Life – A Video For Julie” as a public video on YouTube – and then writing blog entries about it.² Nonetheless, the underlying theme – my passion for Julie since the moment I met her – remains valid. Beside, “In My Intrapsychic Life” doesn’t scan as well.

The following excerpt is from And We’re Still Making Love In My Secret Life – A Video For Julie, a post about the making of this video:

In fact, Julie was a vital  part of the core of  my interior reality from the day I met her, although she was, during the first eight years of that time, a singularly chaste component of my  private universe, as I pointed out in the first part of Julie’s Story, This Is How A Love Story Began:

And, starting then, we spent time together, at first studying together, sharing lunch, and, most often, just talking. It was all quite innocent, because, as I would glibly but accurately note when retelling our story to friends — at that point, Julie was still married, and I was still Christian.

But all that was to change.

That change included not only the two of us living together for almost 20 years in an outrageously happy marriage but also her continued presence in my thoughts in the years since her death.

Julie and Da Boyz

In My Secret Life
by Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson

I saw you this morning.
You were moving so fast.
Can’t seem to loosen my grip
On the past.
And I miss you so much.
There’s no one in sight.
And we’re still making love
In My Secret Life.

I smile when I’m angry.
I cheat and I lie.
I do what I have to do
To get by.
But I know what is wrong,
And I know what is right.
And I’d die for the truth
In My Secret Life.

Hold on, hold on, my brother.
My sister, hold on tight.
I finally got my orders.
I’ll be marching through the morning,
Marching through the night,
Moving cross the borders
Of My Secret Life.

Looked through the paper.
Makes you want to cry.
Nobody cares if the people
Live or die.
And the dealer wants you thinking
That it’s either black or white.
Thank G-d it’s not that simple
In My Secret Life.

I bite my lip.
I buy what I’m told:
From the latest hit,
To the wisdom of old.
But I’m always alone.
And my heart is like ice.
And it’s crowded and cold
In My Secret Life.

I’ve Missed Julie For For A Long, Long Time

• Same Date, Same Song, Same Memories Of Julie
• And Then She Was Not
• A Lifetime Together Will Not Be Enough
• This Is How A Love Story Began
• Kept In My Heart
• Dying is simple, What’s worst is the separation
• Now, We Both Miss Julie
• Madeleines – And Hong Kong Egg Cakes – From Reading About Alice By Calvin Trillin
• Reading Julie’s Letters On Our Anniversary
• Julie Liked Yellow Roses On Her Birthday
• Making Seared Tuna
• Julie, 11th Century Chinese Poetry, And “Build Me Up, Buttercup”
• Carol Shields On Living, Writing, Cancer, and Julie
• Madeleines From Reading Back When We Were Grownups

1. Julie Showalter was a spectacular woman and, for far too brief a time, the center of my life.  The strange and wondrous story of how Julie and I met, fell in love, and – 9 years, 2 husbands, 1 wife, and 2 careers later – got together to spend a magnficient20 years together before her death, her prize-winning writing, and  the life we shared are featured in many posts at this site. See Julie Showalter FAQ. [↩]
2. Of course, the same notion of cognitive dissonance applies to writing and then performing “In My Secret Life” all over the world to thousands of people, but Mr Cohen and Ms Robinson would, I suppose, claim artistic license. [↩]

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 miss her every day.

In My Secret Life

I thought this year I could forgo a post commemorating the day Julie died.

Turns out I can’t.

The story behind this video can be found at And We’re Still Making Love In My Secret Life – A Video For Julie

In My Secret Life
by Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson

I saw you this morning.
You were moving so fast.
Can’t seem to loosen my grip
On the past.
And I miss you so much.
There’s no one in sight.
And we’re still making love
In My Secret Life.

I smile when I’m angry.
I cheat and I lie.
I do what I have to do
To get by.
But I know what is wrong,
And I know what is right.
And I’d die for the truth
In My Secret Life.

Hold on, hold on, my brother.
My sister, hold on tight.
I finally got my orders.
I’ll be marching through the morning,
Marching through the night,
Moving cross the borders
Of My Secret Life.

Looked through the paper.
Makes you want to cry.
Nobody cares if the people
Live or die.
And the dealer wants you thinking
That it’s either black or white.
Thank G-d it’s not that simple
In My Secret Life.

I bite my lip.
I buy what I’m told:
From the latest hit,
To the wisdom of old.
But I’m always alone.
And my heart is like ice.
And it’s crowded and cold
In My Secret Life.

I’ve Missed Julie For For A Long, Long Time

• This Is How A Love Story Began
• Kept In My Heart
• Dying is simple, What’s worst is the separation
• A Lifetime Together Will Not Be Enough
• And Then She Was Not
• Madeleines – And Hong Kong Egg Cakes – From Reading About Alice By Calvin Trillin
• Reading Julie’s Letters On Our Anniversary
• Julie Liked Yellow Roses On Her Birthday
• Making Seared Tuna
• Julie, 11th Century Chinese Poetry, And “Build Me Up, Buttercup”
• Madeleines From Reading Back When We Were Grownups

I am taking a day or two off. While I have much I hope to accomplish, the first  item on today’s agenda is perhaps the clearest indicator why I’m not attending to my usual tasks, such as generating a typically prolix, profound, and profane Heck Of A Guy post.

My morning will be spent re-reading messages written by Julie¹ to me during what constituted our long deferred courtship that finally took place during the 1970s.  I’ve previously described that period in a Heck Of A Guy post,  The First Of A Million Kisses:

We’ll kiss the first of a million kisses
and let the past fall away
~From Allelujah by Fairground Attraction

…then I did the simplest thing in the world.
I leaned down… and kissed him.
And the world cracked open.
~Agnes de Mille

Julie and I needed eight years  to get from our first meeting to our first kiss.

To get from our first kiss to our first home together took four months.

Well, it was a pretty good kiss.²

In those four months before we were finally moved in together,

• I had (another) I want a divorce confrontation with my wife, filed divorce papers, and moved into an apartment.
• Julie gave notice at her job, arranged to end the lease on her apartment, packed the belongings essential to her (i.e., clothes and books), and sold or gave away the rest.
• Julie and I spent a couple of hectic, wonderful weekends together in Chicago.
• We called every two or three times a week and exchanged letters (in that benighted pre-email era) daily. ³

Of course, a series of bullet points cannot convey the anxiety, guilt, frustration, excitement, and happiness we experienced during this time. Everything was happening and happening fast.

Julie still had job responsibilities until she actually left her position at the end of this period, and the demands of my residency were unabated. Because my wife and I had no children and no money the legalities of our divorce were relatively simple, but there were tears, mutual insults, accusations, and counter-accusations aplenty. My soon-to-be ex-wife’s obligatory suicide threat was followed two days later by a polite, if urgent, request that I talk to the movers who were insisting that it was physically impossible to move a large sofa from her apartment to the moving van.⁴ I needed money so I was working extra hours in my part-time job at a halfway house for recently discharged state hospital patients. That such arrangements were officially forbidden but traditionally winked at by the residency added one more unit of ambiguous risk. Yada, yada, yada, …

Neither Julie or I ran this gauntlet unscathed (that’s not how gauntlets work), but we were sustained by our belief that we were, finally, destined to succeed. This conviction was, I now realize, a fallacy, albeit a fallacy with anodyne properties for which I’m grateful.

And, that element of faith may explain my current difficulty describing this period of alternating (and sometimes simultaneous) angst and excitement in a way that communicates the experience. I’ve tried a half-dozen approaches to express the emotional roller coaster ride of those four months in this posting, but this effort has been unrequited. When all this was going on, my life was hectic and unsettled but – and this appears to be the key – never in doubt. I knew what I wanted was to be with Julie; everything else was secondary.

So, this is, I suppose, an apology of sorts.

You’re just gonna have to trust me on this one.

The excerpt that follows, taken from a letter written two months before Julie moved to Chicago to be with me, is unfair to Julie, whose epistolary style abounded with wit, allusions, nestled references, double entendres, wisdom, depth, insight,  and, of course, salacious suggestions, none of which is included here. Nonetheless, I believe these passages will explain why I am giving this endeavor my highest priority.

Dear Wonderful Allan,

I want, need, and deserve to see you (I’ve been such a good little sick girl). Therefore, I will see you. This is a variation on the glad game, much in vogue with N.V. Peale and his ilk.  (You, of course, being absolutely and totally unique in all the world, are ilkless.) …

Where, oh where, has my cynical unromantic attitude gone? I fear it has forsaken me for good (or ill). I’m ready to spend my life in a terminal case of cuteness (or sweetness), sipping banana milkshakes together. …

Carly Simon is singing “Lovin’ you’s the right thing to do.”  How odd, to have a song seem to apply to us. “I know what I think I’ve known all along.”  Ah yes.

My mail today contained “Handyman” magazine, an anniversary gift from [ex-husband], an exhortation from my mother to have a little talk with Jesus ([sister] ratted on me and told her I was trying to raise my consciousness), … and a clever card from [friend] saying “One thing about that operation of yours/It’ll make you forget about sex” (to which she added “for about 5 minutes.” My friends know me).

Now Carly doesn’t have time for the pain. Lucky Carly.

Allan, Allan, Allan – I am infatuated, smitten, head-over-heels, name your cliche (and I do hate cliches. That’s how low you’ve brought me). Why is it getting harder to be without you instead of easier? Why couldn’t I remain detached and calm? Why are you proving, after all this time, irresistible?

Julie

Those words are not going to be mistaken for the lyrics of a Leonard Cohen song, but they do offer the music I need today.

1. Julie was my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily sexy wife, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. She was also a prize-winning writer. This blog includes many other posts about her and the unlikely but true story of our romance  as well as several of her short stories and other pieces.  For the location of the various content about or by Julie, see Julie FAQ. [↩]
2. For more about that first kiss, see Willie, Waylon, Jerry Lewis, Julie, And Me [↩]
3. The built-in USPS delay resulted in three or four parallel mail conversations. The response to a joke mailed today would arrive perhaps four days later; in the meantime, two or three notes responding to other letters would arrive. One had to be on the ball. [↩]
4. I pointed out to the workmen that they were the same crew that had moved the sofa into the apartment and that the sofa had not grown nor had the apartment doors shrunk [↩]