The following letter “Memories”, summarizes the relationship Jeanne, and I moved into many years ago. We were deeply in love but never married. She led a life separate from mine as we both married other individuals but never fell out of love. Jeanne was diagnosed with breast cancer which progressed to terminal…and after a year of extreme and failed invasive medical treatments, no support from her spouse and the need to care for her 93-year-old mother, she ended her life. In Aug of 2016 I had something pulling at me to go to her home which I had never been to before. What I found was a house in one of the highest end communities in the area but a house which seemed to have no life, which was not a home I would have envisioned Jeanne living. It was maybe two years later I was told Jeanne had taken her life that very August in 2016. The pull and voice within me that brought me to her home was just the beginning of many communications which began to flow to me. At first, I ignored the information coming to me until one evening I felt I needed write down the words which seemed to be Jeanne trying to convey to me her state of being in the Spiritual and the journey which she experienced that lead to the ending of her life and then her words to me as she moved through the next realm. The main elements of this site are many of those words of guidance. I have provided a LETTER To The Reader as background to help one reading through this site to have an understanding as to why I strongly believe it is Jeanne helping me understand life both in the Physical and life in the Spiritual
Dear Memories,
Deep love doesn’t fade with the passing years even as life’s obstacles and decisions move you down separate paths…It may have been almost 50 years ago that Jeanne and I were together, but the memories and feelings seem like it was yesterday as my love for her hasn’t acknowledged the dimension of time…
I’m not sure whether our relationship was a love story of which the outcome was already determined by destiny or whether it would be considered a tragedy that rivals Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, perhaps both.
We began dating in high school and our relationship developed into one with an intense love for each other that seemed to generate an energy which was meant to last for a lifetime. There was an unspoken promise that marriage was in our future after we put college behind us. But life seldom unfolds in the way you expect or even hope. Jeanne was headed for college in Virginia and me to college in Maryland. Not a good situation for two individuals in love, especially when that puts them on a course where the one, they love…isn’t a part of their new environment and they plan to spend much of their next four years away from each other. None-the-less, it seemed that our relationship was continuing as planned…until one day Jeanne came to my home to tell me that we needed to date other people…my response was I don’t want to date anyone else, but I had already sensed that she was moving in a separate direction as she was becoming absorbed into the social culture of college…her decision had been made…I was left standing on my front porch watching my future walk away. It had only been several months earlier that Jeanne wanted me to fully understand just how in love she was with me as she took the intimacy between us to the highest level two individuals in love can experience. Unfortunately, she hadn’t accounted for all the other influences and relationships one encounters in college that were going to change our lives. She was my world, and I thought my future …I guess her desire to date others made sense and was probably inevitable but that still didn’t stop the pain…I went from knowing this is the person I will spend the rest of my life with…to her thinking we needed to see others cut more deeply into my soul than I thought possible…unfortunately as life unfolded, I found this wasn’t close to the deepest pain I would experience from the loss of one I love…but at the time it felt as though nothing could have hurt more, so I put up walls and barriers to protect me from the pain… Before we saw each other again it was a number of months when Jeanne thought we needed to understand where our relationship stood. Although the time together was intimate, the question was unanswered as our lives had taken different directions leaving an uncertainty about just how we should move forward…she went back to Virginia, me to Maryland and the true depth of our love for each other was left unspoken. Even so, I always knew I loved her, and over time I found the intensity of her love remained as deep as mine, but we didn’t talk again for several years. By this time, I was married and didn’t know if she was married or not and thought I would try to find out how her life was going. The only number I had for her was the one where she lived when we last dated…so I called her parents’ home, and her mom answered. Jeanne wasn’t married and even though her mom wouldn’t give me her number she must have told her I called because not much later… Jeanne called me. It wasn’t until our 10th High School reunion that we would see each other face to face…during the evening we hadn’t spoken but when I saw her leaving I knew we needed to talk and went to her…as she walked away I called her name…when she turned around my heart stopped…We talked about trying to get together and she asked me if I would like to come to her townhouse. When I pulled up in front of her home, I don’t know why but…on my way to her door I told myself “You can’t kiss her”. Maybe I realized the position it would put her in, or maybe I didn’t know why I said that to myself…after all these years I still question that commitment… Seeing her was beyond perfect, being with her, the ease of the conversation between us, everything just felt right…then as I began to leave …I asked her…”you haven’t met anyone?”…her response froze me, she looked at me and said… “I haven’t…because since the day we went our separate ways I have compared everyone I dated…to you”…. as I looked back into her eyes they seemed to become portals to her soul and they were telling me what she so wanted to say but knew she shouldn’t and I desperately wanted to kiss her but knew I couldn’t, instead I softly touched her chin, gently caressed her cheek and then tenderly pulled her into me …heart feeling heart…that hug was more intimate than any kiss or touch I have ever had or have had since…it was the most intimate moment in my life…as I opened the door to leave she gently laid her hand on my arm and said “I always knew you were going to be successful”…that was the last time we ever saw each other. It was almost twenty years later…on a flight back from one of my West coast offices when I sat next to, at the time her closest friend… do you know what the chances of that are… with the number of flight attendants, the number of United daily flights, the other airlines I could have been on, for her schedule to put her deadheading on that plane, sitting in the seat next to me on a wide body with over 300 seats, on the same day and time I was returning from one of my many offices throughout the US, for us to be put together for over 5 hours had a probability which is impossible to calculate… …it was more than a coincidence. She gave me Jeanne’s number and I called…again the ease and comfort of the conversation was as if we were still dating. We promised we would get together, but I later found that there was no way that was going to happen as her husband was, among other things, a very controlling individual. Not too long after we talked, her dad passed away and she called to see if I could come to his funeral as “he was like a second father to you after your dad died in when we were dating”….I was unable to attend…but there was something in her voice, the way she recalled how close she felt I was to her father, it was more than her wanting me at the service, it was something so much deeper… but as with other conversations…It wasn’t until after her life ended tragically that the depth and meaning of her words to me over the years fell into place and I understood the love behind them… You see I wasn’t the only one who had their heart broken all those years before…
Life holding true to its unpredictable form, doors opened about Jeanne’s past, which I never even realized that there were doors that could be opened. One such door that was unlocked was done by Laurie, who had been married to Johnny, a friend of mine since childhood. Ironically, as well as I knew Laurie…what I didn’t know, Laurie, also being friends with Jeanne, stayed in close contact with her throughout college. Through their friendship Laurie had extensive insight into Jeanne’s decision to date others, her attempts to engage in other relationships and the very difficult and emotional impact my starting to date someone else had on her…it was that understanding that was revealed to me which shattered the barriers I had constructed within to protect me from the pain of our relationship ending. Then the manner in which it was brought to me seemed to be as if fate was unfolding. Laurie was deeply in love with Johnny who had died from medical complications several years before Jeanne’s life ended. When I found Jeanne had taken her own life, I desperately needed someone to talk too…, so I thought she was someone I could talk with about Jeanne…Until then Laurie and I had never discussed Jeanne and my relationship… with the exception of her one time mentioning that a number of years before she tried to get Jeanne out to lunch with some high school friends but Jeanne didn’t feel her husband would let her to go…So it was somewhat of a shock that Laurie had such intimate knowledge of Jeanne’s feelings about our relationship and the depth of hurt its coming to an end had caused her…That is when Laurie began to explain to me how Jeanne seemed to be searching for something and then told me …“you completely broke her heart”, …but Laurie…Jeanne is the one who wanted to date others.. ”Well Sean, she was absolutely crushed , distraught and seemed lost when you started dating someone else”….those words came at me as if a massive avalanche hit me and all Jeanne’s words over the years came crashing down on me…and the weight and true meaning of them formed into a crystalized truth… the statement “since the day we went our separate ways…I have compared everyone I dated…to you”, made me realize that the deep hurt I felt when she wanted to date others is unknowingly what I did to her when I began to seriously date someone else…and realization of the intensity of our love for each other pushed through the barriers, breached the walls that were guarding my mind and split my soul wide open which has yet to heal … until that moment I had not let myself completely accept or fully acknowledge my overwhelming love for Jeanne…but being told, “you completely broke Jeanne’s heart” released the pent-up feelings and the intensity of my love for her…a love that came flooding back to me as I remembered what we had and what we left unsaid that day so long ago….I realized we both had not let ourselves embrace and share with each other that which burned deep within us for all those years…our unparalleled and unconditional love for each other…a love which didn’t fade with time.