I was thinking about someone who had helped me greatly on this journey that I am on this morning and tried to look him up... We lost touch last year and I had no other way of getting in touch with him at the time. Because he was in very poor health and the last call we had he tried to tell me good by ( but I did not let him), I assumed that he had passed away. I was angry. And I got stuck there for a while.
This morning I was reading an article on how the relationships in our lives are there to help create in us the people we were created to be, and my heart soften, I remembered all the things I had learned while in the relationship with this man. He really taught me so very much about myself. Loving him really was one of the best things in my life. Though I really believed that he had past away, finding out that it was true... that broke my heart.
What did I learn from him. I think the most important thing he taught me was that I could really love again, and that there was someone out there I could connect with on the level that I wanted to connect with. At the time I had met this man I had not really fallen in love in many many years. I thought I had already had and lost my "one" true love and that was that. He showed me otherwise and so very much more.
Being with him showed me how I had always lost myself in the relationships I was in, always trying to be what/who I "thought" the other person wanted me to be rather then just being "me" the person they were attracted to in the first place.
Being with him also showed me how I was drawn to men who where so very much like my biological father, in looks but also in personality and characteristics. Now this was very interesting to me since I never really knew my biological father...I did not meat him till I was 16 and only saw him a handful of times till he passed away last year.
About two years ago I had the opportunity to get many of the men who had shared my life together in the same room, and it was quite frightening, not only did they share the same physical characteristics for the most part, but they all had similar personalities, just different extremes. And they were all wounded, they all were emotionally distant. They all had beards, they all (with the exception of one ) were varying degrees of over weight, they were all "rough" men capable of a little class when needed. They were all aged bad boys to different degrees.
This man I am writing about was no different. And I loved him deeply, I still do and always will. Just as I love all the men who have been part of my life.
My relationship with this man though was what opened my eyes to this pattern in my life. He was never satisfied with the status quo, he wanted to know why I did things that I did, Why did I change who I was to try and make him happy? And in asking those kinds of questions and demanding answers from me, he taught me so very much about myself. We had a deep intellectual connection... we "got" each other. He was not perfect, far from it... But he was totally honest with me from the beginning, and we could talk... really talk.. I have really missed him in my life, I have missed the conversations we had.
He also helped to vastly improve my life. He wanted only the best for me, and helped me find the desire for the best for myself within myself. Because of him I was able to quit smoking... he gave me a whole new way of thinking about it that was so instrumental in my being about to lay them down and never pick them up again. I know he would have been so happy to see the changes that I have made in my life and happier still to know that I made them for myself... I will continue to miss him, and continue to love him, and today I really begin mourning for the loss of him. I am no longer angry, just grieving the loss of his own brand of brilliance, while celebrating that same brand of brilliance. Leonard Cass of Spencer Tennessee, you are greatly loved and greatly missed.
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