
As the years progressed, we spent more time with each other, but other things would conspire to separate us. A stumble in the clear daylight, a numbing of the legs, a blurring of the vision. Something was always trying to pry us apart.
In better days, there would be dinners outside under the portico that I had built for her. I remember her crying as I drove a nail through my arm when I was bulilding it, and she took me to the emergency room. Her affliction was usually to blame for a mishap, and now I was stealing thunder from the disease from which there was no cure.

I have been thinking about the wine we loved. One I remember so well was on a summer day in Rome. We were sitting in a little trattoria near the Vatican, drinking wine from a carafe. It was yellow. It was cool. And it was from the hills surrounding Rome. A sweet memory that wine and Italy played a minor part in.

She loved to cook. Squash casserole, pork loin, red eye gravy, she didn’t consider herself a cook. But the simple things she did, I loved. And the wines we loved with them were from a time that was so much simpler than now. A lovely Verdicchio from Matelica. Or a Pinot Grigio from Friuli, before such a wine would be spoiled by its own success. And the aperitif from France, Lillet, that she loved so much.

When she reached the autumn of her very young life, wine ceased to have the appeal for her that it did in our earlier years. She would have a glass with me, but I could tell that wine wasn’t going to cure what was taking her apart, day by day. So, what we loved we left in the wine closet as she and we made one last stab at fighting the Goliath that was blocking our light.
Our last wine together, a few weeks before she died, during Christmas, was a Dolcetto. I don’t remember how we came to decide upon that as our last wine to love together, but from a not so sweet several years of doing battle, this one last glass of red, raised to our lips, was so very sweet and moving.
To this day I remember all of the wines we loved in our life of love with great affection and melancholy.

5 comments:
There was no other like Liz. the courage, passion, and kindness enveloped her. I did not know her well but I think of her often and miss her much. She was a true lady.
Angela
It's hard for me to say anything, amico.
"There are sicknesses worse than sicknesses"
There are pains that do not ache, not even in the soul,
Yet are more painful than all the others.
There are anxieties dreamed of more real
Than those real life brings us, sensations
Felt only by imagining them,
More our own than life itself.
So many things exist without existing,
Exist, and linger on and on,
And on and on belong to us, and are us...
Over the turbid green of the wide-spreading river
The white circumflexes of the gulls...
Over and above the soul, the useless fluttering
Of what never was, nor ever can be, and that's all.
Let me have more wine, life is nothing.
Note
My soul came apart like an empty jar.
It fell overwhelmingly, down the stairs.
Dropped from the hands of a careless maid.
It fell. Smashed into more pieces than there was china in the jar."
--Fernando Pessoa
The few times I was able to spend with Liz were always special. I can still hear her infectious laugh. You were truly blessed to experience love that transcends even death itself.Tina
Beautifully written and very very sad.
This makes me weep, compels the spectre of Phillip. Long may they run, forever young.
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