Harvard Museum of Natural History

Yesterday afternoon the kids and I met up with some of their cousins and aunts at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. This was the place that Chris and I visited on our first date, November 11, 2001. So many years have passed that my memories of our first date are not sharp, only warmly happy. I wasn't concerned that being at the museum would be any more difficult or sad than doing anything else without Chris now, and it wasn't. I'm really glad we went.

As we approached Cambridge, I could not even remember what the museum building looked like or exactly where it was on the Harvard campus. Once we entered the museum it felt familiar and as we climbed the steps to the displays, the stairway and old glass windows came back to me. At the top of the stairs visitors must choose to see exhibits to the left or right, either way passing through a gift shop. This I remembered. As we chose an exhibit and started wandering, I kept trying to remember doing this with Chris. At first there wasn't much that I recognized, but once we started seeing glass cases of fossils, bones, animals, and birds of all kinds I did have a clear memory. Chris and I definitely spent time looking at this section, oh yes, we saw those large cats and bears, the pinwheel of brightly colored beetles, impossibly tiny hummingbirds, giant skeletons. The museum seemed unchanged by time. 

When I'm out in public now I find myself paying more attention to other people since I don't have my person to be focused on anymore. I'm not looking for Chris but I'm noting the many, many people who are not him and clearly did not meet his fate. At the museum there were lots of young families for an "I Love Science" event, families with two or three kids, some asleep in strollers. Even though we were long through with that stage, this particular demographic pokes sharply at a place inside me and elicits unkind thoughts - I bet you won't lose the dad of the family and you're not even aware that you could. Probably not such a healthy or helpful line of thinking... I turned my attention away and looked for other not-Chris people. I saw a 50-something, bespectacled, lively father with some affable twenty-something young adults, presumably his children. Ugh. Then I saw several groups of older adults enjoying the museum and each other. Can't even imagine that kind of future... Then we stopped at a table staffed by graduate students who showed us carnivorous plants. Now this is what I want, give me the dark stuff, plants eating bugs are right up my alley. I was distracted by the impressive fleshy bulbous traps containing strong acid, and more so by the exuberance of the young grad student using her phone light to show us the liquid in the plant. This stirred some feeling I couldn't quite identify.

Then I saw them. Young couples, probably grad students, and several of them at that. Some quiet, others talking, some holding hands, all in seemingly private worlds oblivious to the other visitors. There was that feeling again - something like nostalgia. A longing for their young adulthood. It was seeing a different time in my life with the perspective of middle age - I was once a hopeful 24-year old just beginning to find myself and my way the last time I was at this museum.

As we entered the Earth and Planetary Science room, the most vivid memory came back to me. This place, now this I remember well. The museum was about to close and Chris and I had not been in this room long. We were dazzled by the colors, crystals, and the promise of a new relationship just barely underway. Want to grab dinner in Harvard Square? Sure. It was dark outside and the display cases of gems seemed to shine brightly in contrast. I remember similarly shining with happiness. Here was a flash of flirtation, there the first flutter of falling in love, under it all hummed a current of hope that something was at the very beginning of its existence. I've had a good time - would you want to have coffee? Sounds good.

I do know Chris was happy in those early days, too. I asked him out but he chose me back. Separately, we both went back to the museum gift shop to find a first Christmas gift for the other and had a laugh over that when we realized it. I picked out an ornament of a wolf for him, he chose a soap for me that looked like a crystal from the gem room. The ornament is packed away with holiday decorations in the attic, the soap still wrapped in plastic hidden away in a cabinet, too precious to actually use. How strange that these mementos survived him. The thought never crossed my mind that could be possible, and I doubt it did his.

I wanted to spend most of my time yesterday in the room full of rocks. It prompted me to reach for other memories from my earliest days with Chris. As I roamed the room examining crystals in all kinds of forms from the weird to the wondrous, I revisited some of those sweet days from so many years ago. Getting to know each other, times with mutual friends, becoming serious, deciding to get married. This particular room seemed to give me relief from agonizing over the end and opened up access to other memories that I had been having difficulty in finding.

The ephemeral nature of time became painfully clear as I wandered through the past. One moment gives way to the next, which gives way to the next, and on and on and on. Time is truly like a river, you can never stop it or go back. Where are those first fleeting moments of "us" now? What significance do they hold now that one of us is dead? I thought of Robert Frost's famous poem:

Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; but only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Perhaps there is no answer but the fact that moments cannot last, no matter how beautiful. Even if Chris was here now, those early times would still feel long gone. They had to pass otherwise we would not have gotten to other good stages and unforgettable experiences together. Our perfect dawn gave way to a cloudless blue sky day with a stunning sunset over the ocean. One not possible without the other before it.

Something happened in that gem room of the museum yesterday. I smiled that it happened. I honestly smiled that it all happened at the same time that I cried over it all being over. Without even realizing it came from me, I heard a whisper of a new unspoken refrain among the cacophony of the others:

Thank you. Thank you for loving me. Thank you.