The Sorrowful Love Nests of Never Again

Cause you never think the last time is the last time. You think there will be more.

You think you have forever, but you don’t.

– Meredith Grey, Grey’s Anatomy

It was no small gift that . . . at a fairly early age I was made aware 

of the fragility of human happiness.

– William Maxwell

For the last dozen years I have been contemplating what I have come to realize only late in life is the most melancholy pairing of words in the English language. The average reader might think these words would have something to do with death or dying. Death is certainly sad, but all by itself, death is a one-time phenomenon, and then it is over.

No, the pair of words I am convinced is the most sorrowful pairing in the English language applies to the entire gamut of human existence from birth to death, though we usually don’t catch on to the sadness that lives in these syllables until we are in our later years. And then it is nearly always a truth we know only silently—in our hearts, not our thoughts: a truth we fail to articulate even to ourselves, let alone anyone else. Very likely, we turn our faces away because we cannot bear the sorrow of this inevitable truth: that the saddest pair of words in the English language is the phrase never again.

The phrase does not begin life sad. Indeed, it usually begins life bringing relief. I’ll never again have to sit for a math test. I’ll never again have to take orders from that SOB. I’ll never again have to look at that face (and, oh, how many such faces there are). I’ll never again have to fix (and, oh, how many things need to be fixed). There is nothing melancholy in these never agains.

The sadness that lingers in never again does not come to us when we are young. And unless we are paying very close attention or are extraordinarily unlucky, the sadness in these words does not reach us even in middle age. The sorrowful truth inside this phrase bides its time. Only when love has built its nest in our hearts does never again reveal its true depths.

So a warning is in order. If you are young and do not yet know the sorrow of never again, you may want to stop reading now and allow your ignorance to continue. I am quite serious with my warning. I believe I would not want to have known what I am about to tell you when I was young or even middle-aged. I would rather have waited till the sorrow of this phrase had revealed itself to me in its own good—or not so good—time. So read further at your own risk.

I’ll begin by remembering the last time I slept in my parents’ house on the eve of my wedding. I was 26 and marrying the girl of my dreams, actually a girl beyond my dreams, a girl I couldn’t even have imagined meeting let alone marrying just a few years earlier. Somehow she said yes to me. And there I was getting up from my bed on the day of our wedding. The light was brilliant in the south and east windows as I was putting on my morning coat and fastening the bow tie. I knew I would never again sleep in that room where I had come of age and where I had endured the loss of two girlfriends in the previous seven years. I feared I would never again see Sharon, and I was right. I never did see her again. And I feared I would never again see Mary Lee, and I was right once again. After the loss of Sharon, I played the Fleetwoods’ “I’m Mister Blue” on my reel-to-reel tape recorder that sat on top of a brass-wire bookcase beside my bed. I played it almost every night for a year. After Mary Lee disappeared, I played “Theme from a Summer Place.” And then I met the woman who would become my wife, and I played our songs: “Dear Heart,” “Strangers in the Night,” “Summer Wind.”

And then came that day when I slept for the last time on that bed in that room. I knew I would never sleep there again, never again open its windows to a spring breeze, never again give my heart to the apple blossoms in May outside the east window. It was with the coming of these understandings that never again first crept into my life, but I did not yet know the phrase was beginning to build a nest inside my heart. It would be decades before I realized the home it had made. I was marrying the most beautiful woman in the world, and so I was a stranger to the independent life never again sooner or later takes up inside all human hearts. Except for Sharon and Mary Lee, I was a stranger to the sorrow of never again. And what did these girls matter, for on my wedding day the most beautiful woman in the world had banished never again from its nest.

Nine years later, the marriage to the most beautiful woman in the world ended. A month and a half before it was over, I rose just after the sun had come up—it was June, 1975—and climbed the stairs to my office on the second floor. A few steps before the top, I turned around to look out the small casement windows that gave out onto our garden. I had never taken such a pause before, but on this morning I was enthralled by the light in the yard. The grass was luminous, and dew clung to the roses. I sat down on a stair and looked for a longer time than you would imagine at what I knew I would never again see. That was the moment I had my first real inkling of the sorrow of never again. Weeks later we sold this most charming of houses, and though my ex-wife bought it back ten years later, I never again saw that early morning June light through those windows.

Half a year later I was transferred from the college campus where I had taught for 7 1/2 years and where I had been a student myself for 5 1/2 years. It had become a dear home to me. A man on the English faculty and another in the humanities department had become my best friends. I never again taught in the same building with them, and the school was never again my home.

Jerry Segal, the friend on the humanities faculty, continued as the best male friend of my life. Hundreds of evenings over the 15 years I knew him, we shared our lives and stories. Literature, philosophy, art, photography (he owned ten cameras and a dark room and did stunning work), gossip, tales of his hometown in Portageville, MO: we told each other our lives, our passions, our disappointments, our stories. I was never bored in his company and always felt deeply valued.

Then, in December 1981, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. In a gradually diminishing way we continued our good times for the next 18 months. Until one day I received a postcard made from one of his photographs: a long shot down a rural road with a Robert’s Motel sign lit in neon against the dark reddish blue night. The Vacancy sign was lit. Because he could no longer speak words, his card asked friends not to visit anymore. I had had my last visit with Jerry. I didn’t know it was my last visit until that card came in the mail. Six months later he strangled to death because his lungs could no longer take in air. That was 41 years ago. I have thought of Jerry nearly every day since then, but I never again saw the best male friend of my life. Perhaps you are coming to understand the depths of never again.

I have mused many times on this phrase over these last eight years. In some of these musings I have tried to imagine that day when my great-grandfather and great-grandmother said goodbye to their parents and brothers and sisters. They lived in a hill town 25 miles southeast of Palermo. Was their goodbye there or did the family accompany them to Palermo for the ship that would take them 5,000 miles away to the port of New Orleans and then up the Mississippi to Chicago? No matter where that goodbye, I have often tried to imagine those last looks on their faces and the last words in their mouths before they turned to board the ship. They had no money and knew this was the last time the retinas of their eyes would behold the images of everything and everyone they had ever known and loved. My great-grandparents lived for another four decades, but they never again looked into the faces of their beloved friends, never again laid eyes on their mothers and fathers, their brothers and sisters.

They were not unusual. In the history of humankind, tens of millions have said final goodbyes to migrate to new lands knowing they would never again see all that they knew and loved. Sooner or later, migrant or not, we all come to know the pathos of never again.

I learned that pathos when I lost a child, when my mother and father died, when I had my last look at dear friends before they gave up the spirit. Each time, never again added to its nest in my heart.

But my deepest learning of never again came with my second wife. On a late February afternoon in 2004 she came in our door sobbing. She had been asked to prepare documents to hire new employees at the Chicago Water Filtration Plant. It was a routine task she had performed many times, but she spent the entire day trying to do it—and couldn’t. The only thing she knew was that she was terribly confused. For several years she had been struggling to remember how to do things at work and at home. But the forgetting of this day broke the bank. She never stepped foot in the Water Plant again.

And so began 11 years of Alzheimer’s, a disease with a long and terrible history of never agains. There was the last time she drove her car. We had bought it for her three years earlier, but by 2012 she was often getting lost coming home from her daughter’s, so one day we took her keys and she was glad—she would never again have to be frightened driving alone. And then there was the day I noticed she did not understand what I was saying to her. As we sat on the patio having breakfast, I pointed to the grass, the sky, the garage, and to my hand and head and asked what they were, and she did not know. And then there was the day we knew she had to wear Depends; after that day she never again wore ordinary underwear. And the last time she could take a shower alone. And the last time she could use the toilet without help. And the last time she could get dressed or undressed or go to bed or get up without help.

And the last time she knew my name or that I was her husband.

And the last time we made love.

And the last time we danced.

And the last time we sang together.

And the last time her eyes met mine.

I could spell out each of these for you, and a hundred more. But what I am most aware of is the nest of never again that each of these gave way to. In the nine and a half years since my wife died, I have been reminded during meals alone, movies alone, waking up alone that I would never again hear her voice, see her face, look into her eyes.

Nine months after my wife died, I learned once more just how relentless those words never again can be. At ten in the morning I received a phone call from my son John telling me that at two in the morning two Chicago police officers and two Glenview police officers stood beside each other at their front door to tell them their oldest son, D. J., had been killed by a train. They were told they would not want to view the remains. Without the slightest forewarning, we would never again see D. J.

In the middle of some nights, even now nine years later, I am still screaming silently from some dark place within me when the image of those four policemen standing at my son’s door comes before me and I see again my grandson’s large, gentle eyes looking at me that I knew on the morning of my son’s call would never look at me again.

One day the people we love the most in this world are with us, and the next day they are not. We must look into the eyes of those we love and listen to their voices and hold their beating hearts to our beating hearts—we must sometimes do these things with an intensity we cannot explain—for one day those eyes and voices and hearts will no longer be with us.

When memories of D. J. and my wife wash through me, as they still do nearly every day, sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I become shiningly aware how all of us build our sorrowful nests of never again with only one thing: twigs of love, our own and the twigs of love given to us by those we love. For all the sadness of these nests, I am certain we would choose to build our nests all over again, for to live without love is to have no home at all. Never again may be the saddest pairing of words in the English language, but only because it is a nest that holds the greatest joy in life: love.

Image Credit: Edward Hopper, Office in a Small City (1953)