As I was driving to my mom’s today for a visit, I was thinking about Kim’s and my life together. The things we liked to do when we first started dating, our young married life, and our life later on. The term that kept cropping up in my mind was “encapsulated”.

Odd term to apply to a relationship, but hear me out.

We were introduced on a blind date. We both pretty much fell for each other on that first date. We didn’t work expressly hard, either one of us, at maintaining outside friendships – they either remained, or they faded pretty much on their own. Our life together was… encapsulated. We seemed very much to be a self-sufficient symbiosis without many needs outside of ourselves and our family. Even as Kim was dying, we looked into our family for the support we needed, hospicing at home.

I truly wonder if I will – if I could – find anything like that again. So much is gone. To compare our life together to construction, it’s as if you spent decades building the biggest, strongest skyscraper, only to have it suddenly disappear, leaving behind only the memory of what it was and what you’d hoped it would become. All of the familiarity is gone. All of the understanding developed over a lifetime together rendered moot. Poof! Just like that.

But love remains. Encapsulated in the half of the whole, it is safeguarded from being lost.