Laying it out

OK. let me lay it all out, amidst the celebration and joy and tidal shifts of change. I am gay. When I was in my mid twenties, I walked into a bar and saw a girl and fell in love. Fell in love with my heart, not my body. Four decades later, with me now being out, and with two remarkable kids--one of whom accepts me and one of whom cannot--I am still in love with that girl. We are still married. I meet so many people, guys who want a relationship, and I am not able to give them what they actually seek (despite the sexual posturing and "come hither" attitude. My heart. Five years ago, months after I came out, leukemia struck her. She almost died. Now, she is recovered, back on her feet, engaged in entirely new avenues of life, and working. But the girl who survived is not the one I married. Chemo changed her. Medically, chemotherapy leaves the patient the same as someone who has had a head injury. It's them, there, standing before you, and yet it isn't. It's a slightly different person, different, not the same. Limited. Fewer internal safety gates, so that what they think with those fewer brain cells is not held back, it comes out without filtering. I was raised old fashioned. 'Til death do us part' means exactly that. She works, she has a social life, she has that boyfriend of four years, but she is still . . . . . limited. She has surgery Monday morning. A hip replacement. Again. I will be there beside her. The fact that he won't, doesn't even register with her. The fact that I have always been there for her, that will on the surface mean little. The emotional stunting caused by the chemotherapy is permanent. But she needs someone to take care of her. And I still love her. And I will be there. Somewhere deep inside in some inexpressible place, she knows this. She just can't show it. I know she depends on me, and rests secure in the knowledge that I will take care of her. Love is like that. Your love for the other person strives to overcomes the obstacles, the shortcomings, the . . . diminishment. The fact that I ache to soul-deep for someone to love me, well, it scars me. I want her to love me back the way she did years ago, a way that disappeared as the decades passed. But that is not possible. I suppose I become caretaker. Because I am still in love with her. Which brings me back to this week. I am gay. But I married the person I wanted to. Now everyone has the right to marry those they love. I worry, though, that today's gay and lesbian citizens do not fully understand what marriage is. For better or worse. In sickness and in health. Til death do you part.