I never expected to find a lover and neither did my partner.  We thought that a deep sexual and cherishing love was gone from our lives.  He had a happy lifetime marriage until his very accomplished wife began to have serious heart failings.

She would talk fervently about the love he would find after she died.  She didn’t want him to be alone, sad and old. She would try to discuss an elegant widow or one of her many friends who might fit into his life after she was done.  Nothing suited him.  Finally she fixed him with a penetrating look and said quietly, “I will send somebody.”  Both Gerhardt and I agreed that, in her human form, she would never have picked me because of my odd thinking.

There was another problem to our becoming lovers.  I didn’t realize that I had been brainwashed into deferring to a man that I desired.  He understood that when it came to sexual congress that I had no sense of selfhood. It took him one and a half weeks of talking before I could embrace the absolute necessity of mutuality in sex.  I had been so badly abused as a child that I didn’t know about love without power. 

He believed implicitly in what C. G. Jung said about love, “Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking.  The one is the shadow of the other.”

It was amazing that we, two people old in our bodies felt like sixteen year-olds in emotional longing to become one.  We were two very old people living our lives fully, well aware of the imminence of death. Open to joy and sorrow, caught up in active involvement with the intimate emotions of a foretaste of heaven.   It would eventually lead to a revelation of the meaning of our intimacy that neither Gerhardt nor I could possible foresee!