This Is The Place We Said Hello
On returning to where it all began — and finding what remains
There’s something that happens when you find your person.
Something settles — in your soul, in your bones, in the part of you that has been quietly searching without quite knowing what it was looking for. And you know with certainty that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.
Until, somehow, some way, that place turns upside down.
When slow, lazy Sundays become repeated questions, constant fidgeting, general confusion. When the carefully arranged trip becomes a struggle to keep composure because your best friend and the love of your life can no longer handle crowds, or changing schedules, or anything that isn’t part of the routine. When your world shrinks to encompass the rooms of your house, and there doesn’t seem to be room anymore for you to be yourself alongside this new version of the life you built.
But back then — when you met and fell in love and built this life together — you pledged your love. And it really doesn’t matter that he’s not the man you married. He’s the one who shifted your soul. And that, at the end of the day, is all that matters.
We folded ourselves into the fabric of daily living — work, friends, chores, trips, rinse and repeat. And it was never repetitive or boring, never ho-hum, because it was us doing it together.
The location was part of that too. A small town in the winter that became a bustling locale for vacationers seeking sun and fun from Washington, Philadelphia, New York and further. The kind of place where the same families came back every summer, staying in the same house, eating at the same restaurants, settling into a two-week rhythm of familiarity and ease. For them, for those two weeks, they were home. They had found a welcoming community. Same as us.
This is the place I fell in love with — at the same time I fell in love with Lee.
The same place we said hello.
I returned to where it all began this past weekend.
Lee rests now with his mother and father, and it felt so right for him to have a place to rest — by the very human parents who nurtured and loved him and were so happy he and I met and became Lee and Vicki. A Celebration of Life was held, and it was just right. Curated, but with enough ease that stories were shared, tears shed, and goodbyes said. Unhurried and with love.
On Saturday morning I went for a walk. A familiar route — one I’ve walked hundreds of times over the years. The town has changed. New buildings, new businesses, different signs. It feels a bit different in the summer vacation season, busier and louder than the quiet winter version I carry in my memory. But the bones of it are still there. I just have to dig a little deeper to find them.
The sights and sounds and scenes haven’t changed in any way that matters. Families with little ones heading to the beach, loaded down with chairs and coolers and towels and sunscreen. Lifeguards making their way to their chairs for a day of keeping beachgoers safe. Morning coffee on front porches on quiet streets, where you say good morning and something else nice, because that’s what you do here. The sound of morning birds. The smell of bacon and coffee wafting through kitchen windows. Walkers and runners getting their miles in before the heat settles in. A woman walking with her mother — or maybe her grandmother — in the early cool of the day.
This is the place I fell in love with.
The same place we said hello.
The Celebration was sweet and heartfelt — a community of people all connected because they knew one man at one point in their lives. They came together from different chapters and different years to recognize him. His crazy college days. His quiet exterior with the huge heart underneath it. The life he discovered and lived with me, in the years none of them were there to see.
A fitting farewell.
I was there for five days and there wasn’t nearly enough time to visit with all the ones I cherish. Lunches and dinners and snapshots of life, but not quite enough time to go deeper. That’s all right. We filled each other’s cups for now. Time for a proper catch-up another time, soon.
Life goes on. People and places change.
Including me.
I am not the woman who walked this route for the first time, newly arrived in a town that would become home, newly in love with the man who would become everything. I am not the woman who moved her husband to a place where — maybe — better care existed, but who found herself walking the caregiving years, hollowed out by the weight of a love that was slowly changing shape. I am someone else now — someone made of all of those women, carrying the joy and the sorrow together, not as opposites but as companions.
Still writing. Still exploring this journey alongside the caregivers who are in the middle of it, in hopes that something I’ve learned might make their path, just slightly, a little easier.
Still here.
Still walking.
This same place we said hello.
Is there a place that holds the whole shape of your love — before the diagnosis, during it, and after? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
