On August 23, 2021, I lost my friend and editor Tom Flynn, a great man among men and women. His death was sudden, unexpected, and far earlier than its due time. Seven days later, I lost my beloved wife, Marie. Her death was not sudden. It was expected, even overdue. Death unhurriedly arrived at our home after fifty-seven months of unrelenting pain. Marie too was a personal hero of mine. She too did great things in her long life, as a nurse, a volunteer serving the poor of La Paz, Bolivia, a friend to many, and, for me, a wife beyond my worthiness! But she loved me anyway, and I loved her. Marie was great but not famous.

As her final weeks flashed by, I gradually realized that the rails of the hospital bed impeded our touching one another. Every day for over fifty years, our day opened with a kiss and an embrace. How difficult it had become to get close enough for that embrace (virtually impossible) and that longed-for kiss (with her lips parched and painful)! I came to taste my own hunger for her touch. There flowed within my memory a song, actually a poem or even a hymn to a lost love, that I knew as a boy. Unchained Melody, written by Alex North and Hyman Zaret and sung so movingly by the Righteous Brothers, seeped into my mind and staked its claim on my heart. It begins:

Woah, my love, my darling

I’ve hungered for your touch

A long, lonely time …

There followed several of my conversations with my beloved Marie. I will share with you one, and it may resonate with feelings you have experienced yourself.

“Oh, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch …”

But how do I touch you now, my loved one? Your ashes have been scattered at sea!

Do I board a seafaring boat to visit you? But your cremains can never be reassembled, reconstituted, revived, infused with life again!

So I must seek you elsewhere. Within me, perhaps? You dwell in my mind as the person who forever loved me despite my flaws, mistakes, and failures.

Let me visit you there, that is, here in my mind-memories of you!

And let me talk with you once again!

There is another place where I can find you … within my heart. You abide in my heart and it is here in my heart where my hunger for your touch may be somewhat satisfied … or, at least, hoped for.

Oh, all those fifty years’ worth of opportunities to touch you, to hold you, to share thoughts and feelings with you … to delight in your sweet presence!

So many opportunities overlooked, postponed, ignored, squandered!

Now I’m left with just mind-memories and a heart torn asunder.

Yet you abide amidst the rubbles of this heart!

This is the best I can do now.

This is the only thing I can do now.

I hope I shall soon feel your tender touch, and feel it more and more palpably with each effort … day by day and time after time.

Oh, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch …

Your loving Nick