If you have not had a chance to read everything posted here, this post would make no sense to you unless you know a key fact – my first wife and the baby died in childbirth.
Sometime after my first wife died, my then mother-in-law started suggesting I date again. She would say, “A young man needs a woman in his life.” She would even suggest people she knew as possible girlfriends. As a married man, I had paid little attention to the women around me in that way. That’s not to say I wouldn’t notice someone who was very attractive or who had a great personality. I was single again and had absolutely no idea how to go about dating. Of course, I knew the basics. Somehow it just seems strange and somewhat impossible to me. My mother-in-law was a very loving person and she kept pushing. There was one person I had seen around and I asked her about that person. I found out she had dated my wife’s brother, so it please my mother-in-law to help me find contact information.
The woman’s name was Nancy. She was a nurse and worked at a teaching hospital and was an instructor there as well. She worked in one of the two OB/GYN sections of the hospital. The section she worked in was for the “difficult cases.” I soon found her absolutely beautiful and intelligent and everything I could imagine I’d want. The rules of dating had changed from the time I had dated my first wife until I found myself single again, but all that’s a post for another time. I think we had gone out several times before I decided to kiss her good night. It was like a bomb went off – not a good bomb. I didn’t know what to call it then, but now I think I would call it a panic attack. I remember suddenly realizing that the kiss was the beginning of falling in love and that meant at that time to me it could put the person I was kissing at terrible risk. They might die if we fell in love with each other. I don’t remember exactly what I did but I think I left Nancy as quickly as I could that night.
Later, I told Nancy what had happened. We became very good friends but never considered romance. We would spend a lot of time together and share things from who we were dating to what was going on in the world. She was very pleased when I found my current wife. Her father was a jeweler and we drove to his store to buy an engagement ring and wedding rings. One of the last contacts I had with her was when she called and told me she had found someone. We lost contact after that as the man she had found had been in Philly for only a period of time and then had to go back to the Midwest to his teaching job.
I think any woman who I would have kissed that soon after the death of my first wife would’ve provoked the same response. Luckily, I found someone who understood and was not offended by my reaction to our kiss.
*I could not think of an appropriate title for this post.
