The following is an email exchange with Mae Neecha on some of the details of my samutti contemplations. It is very long, so I will be breaking it up into a few entries for ease of reading.

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Seemingly out of nowhere, Eric started peeing blood. Unexplained blood in the urine is cancer till proven otherwise (though in his case also very likely kidney stones given his history of them), we are waiting for all the tests and labs to get performed. Naturally, I am freaking out — Eric has always been so hale and hearty, a foil to my own flower-like fragility — it sounds silly, I know, but it has literally never meaningfully dawned on me that he may well die before me.

Now, as we wait for all the testing to commence, it dawns on me what a house of cards I have built my life on: My sense of self, my daily doings, my imagined future, all founded on something as flimsy and undependable as my body, and Eric’s. It takes so little to break. To change. For things to take a totally new, different, never before expected turn.

But let’s back-up, because the story really doesn’t start here, in this life, with this husband. It starts wayyyyyy before….

Years ago, when I watched a friend who was willing to break-off her happy marriage if her wife didn’t consent to having a second child, I saw the root issue: For my friend, her life was given meaning, purpose, by the role of motherhood. Since her own childhood, her imagination of a perfect, proper, meaningful life was one in which she had two children. It was non-negotiable. She did by the way get her wish, but along with a second child, her wife’s resentment seeped into their relationship. That and a whole lotta extra work were prices paid.

When I look at parallels in my own life, I see how deep the samutti of partner runs for me. Knowing to look for this concept, and I can see the frequency and mechanics by which it plays out in my life: Even as a child, I play-acted the role of wife. Each partner I have looked for has been the same –someone to care for me and support me. I believe such care and support confirms me as special, makes me worthy, that it will keep me safe in this world and that it is inseparable from having a partner. For Alana ‘Partner’ equals a whole ball of wax well above and beyond a monogamous mate.

All activities are sweeter with the presence of a partner, it is like just having Eric around makes the experiences real and meaningful. In his absence, I wait for him. The ideal future is one with Eric —  without him the future fantasy I have dies on the vine. Partner is what gives meaning and purpose to my being, just the way children is what give meaning and purpose to my friend’s.

I was born into this world with a partner shaped hole in my heart. With the idea that a particular form — a Platonic Partner (i.e. sammuti) — would make me fulfilled and a quest to find the person who fit my heart shaped ideal. Enter Eric, the most recent hole plug, who if I squint hard enough, adjust my hole (i.e. expectations) broadly enough, is a ‘perfect fit’.

In the abstract, the failings of this plan are twofold:

1) How do I expect an immaterial hunger, a desire to be/to have meaning, to be fulfilled by some form, even an imagined form? I am the one who carved the shaped hole in my heart: The form I choose is arbitrary, the traits I believe the form can/should posses is equally as arbitrary, there is no meaning in what is arbitrary beyond what I assign.

2) Even more clearly, how do I expect an actual rupa form will embody a set of traits that I have imagined up, and that only exist in my mind? In other words — by what mechanism can a physical object fill an immaterial hole?

In the more mundane, the problem with my plan is simple — my hole plug is flimsy. Just a single virus — imperceptible with the eye — can take him out. A single mutated cell can overwhelm his body and cause it to stop working. A bullet that fits in the palm of my hand can end his life, and all the meaning and imagination I had hung upon it.

A while back, Oat generously translated the forward in her chanting book written by LP Thoon. One part really struck me: LP Thoon talked about how even if we get the most luxurious and delicious food today, we need to seek out food all over again tomorrow. The effort never ends, because the food itself decays, and the hunger it fulfills is fulfilled only temporarily.

I think about Eric and I see I face the same dilemma; not only does his body decay, but the hunger he fulfills in me — my longing for the meaning I have imbued into having a partner — is only temporarily fulfilled. So soon, I will be hungry again, back on the long, painful, prowl to find a new partner plug to fill the partner shaped hole in my heart.

I love Eric, I really do. But if I am being honest, I love my idea of who Eric is (calling out samutti again to make this all very explicit), who he is to me. When he is gone, I will mourn not the loss of Eric, but the loss of what I imagine him to be, and of a fantasy future we shared together in my head alone.

What Eric actually is, is a mystery to me; he is a continual, shifting, array of thoughts and feelings and beliefs and ideas and a form. A form which I clobber onto, which I use to peg (in my mind) his continually shiftingness into something stable, fixed, able to be identified and loved and claimed by me.  And when his flimsy ass form is no more, when a body that is so clearly not him, ceases to be something I can credulously call Eric, my devastation will set in. I will lose that form I convinced myself gave meaning to my life. A meaning I myself arbitrarily created and peddled as valuable. Driven by hunger I will forage again and a new misadventure — marked by striving, disappointment, peril and loss (i.e. internet dating 😉 ) will  ensue.