I don't know how to encapsulate 17 years of our lives together, but this was my best albeit imperfect attempt. The last part of it sucks, but I guess that's just reflective of how our story also had a crappy ending.
Many little girls grow up with plans of marriage and babies always percolating in their heads. I was never one of those little girls. I had dreams of faraway travel and adventure. So when I finally was able to move abroad to Spain and study to be an English teacher, I brushed aside my co-workers’ insistence that I would meet someone over there. After all, my plans were to continue on to Russia to live and work.
I had changed my booking with just a few weeks to go. Instead of heading to St Petersburg, I decided to go to Granada, Spain. It was February and cold and Granada would be warmer than Petersburg. This turned out to be a fortuitous decision.
I met Jon about three days after I arrived in Spain. I was just about to teach in front of a class for the first time when I realized I couldn’t find the flashcards I’d made for the lesson. I searched frantically then retraced my steps to the computer lab. At the computer I had used earlier sat a big bearded dude. Oh no, the introvert in me thought, now I have to talk to this jerk and ask him if he’d seen my stupid cards. He had not. The cards turned out to be under my folder on the desk where I was sitting. The big stupid bearded guy would turn out to be my future husband.
We bonded over our love of Granada’s amazing kebabs and incredible historical sites. We initially hung out in a large group of American and British expats. I noticed that whenever I fell behind in the group, Jon would always hang back and wait for me. This was my first clue that he like-liked me. I realized I felt the same as he spouted historical facts about William the Conqueror and made really, really funny jokes. Then one night, we had some absinthe at our friends’ flat and by the end of the night, we were coupled up.
He was just supposed to be my “Spanish fling.” I still had plans to follow my lifelong dreams and move to Russia. But instead, I decided to go to Madrid where a job and a flat with friends was waiting for me. Plus I was not too far from him. We figured we’d see each other once a month. There was a bus from Madrid to Granada that left regularly. Then we skipped the second week, and realized that was too long to go without seeing each other. After that, we were making the trip every weekend. I would go down to Granada one week, he would come up to Madrid the next. I was always excited to meet him at the bus station. Even the time that his shower was broken and he hadn’t bathed for 6 days.
By August, my Spanish fling and I decided to move in together. Not because we were serious or anything, but our friends were leaving the city and it was just super easy to take over their place and move in. It was nice. He was warm and funny. And my thoughts of Russia – and the winter coat I’d brought with me from home – were mostly forgotten. No regrets.
We lived happily together, with side trips to various Spanish cities, until November. At this time, we both decided to go home for the Thanksgiving holidays. We said goodbye at the bus station and tears flowed from my eyes. An old man looked at us wistfully and was spouting romantic things in Spanish “Ah, amor.” (But more complicated than that – I can’t remember but I’m sure Jon did.) As Jon rode away in the bus, I didn’t think I would ever see him again.
But we did. We went on to travel to Turkey, Greece, Slovenia, Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, Croatia, Bosnia, South Korea, North Korea, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Japan, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Nepal, and India (having already been to Spain, Portugal, Hungary, and Austria.) Then we got to live in a tropical paradise with our sweet little girl and a crazy but adorable puppy. Those family memories are just as special as the monumental ones of us climbing the Great Wall or descending into an ancient Egyptian pyramid. We lived a charmed, wonderful life together which was never entirely perfect, but good enough for me to know how lucky we were. It was hard to raise a baby so far from our families. Jon hated working at the high school, apart from his brief career as a football coach, but he did it for Sofya. Our kitchen was out of commission for 6 months because of a mold issue. Money was tight. Then Trump got elected. We were all fortunate enough in the pandemic to stay home for a year together to stay safe from the virus. All the threats to my little family were external, but we were safe in the house. We didn’t break quarantine until that fateful call from the MRI facility to tell Jon to go to the ER because of a mass on his lower spine.
I don’t want to remember the cancer era, but I will never be able to forget those final days, which I will not even put into words. Until the final few months, when he was losing a lot of mobility, we still tried to enjoy our lives as much as we could. Jon would say we needed to “steal some joy from the universe” as we would take beach walks or go out to eat on the days I would take off for his oncologist appointments. I’m just thankful we lived our lives to the fullest, always focusing on gaining experiences over buying stuff. I feel like we lived lifetimes together in the amount of amazing experiences we were able to have. But it was still not enough. Not for me, and definitely not for Sofya.
All I wanted was to live out a quiet life with him, even if we never traveled again. I wanted us to grow old together. To watch Sofya blossom into a beautiful young woman, together. To make Statler and Waldorf comments about everything we encountered. I never wanted to get married, but now I can’t imagine life without my husband at my side. Jon was my greatest partner, travel buddy, and fellow misanthrope. I lived a happier, fuller, and funnier life because of him. I will forever grieve the loss of our life together. Whenever I saw him, I felt happy. Now walking around our house where he should be, all I see are the ghosts of our former life. Where there used to be laughter and joy, all that remains is emptiness and tears. And Sofya.
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