Words

"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

Six years ago last week, Dave posted that quote on my Facebook wall. Privately, so that only the two of us could see it.

The quote is by Joan Didion and I had told Dave that she is my favorite author. One night, looking for something romantic to say, he probably Googled Joan Didion quotes and found that one.  

We had just started dating and we went out a lot, to dinner, for drinks. I took the post to mean it the way Dave meant it, which is that the two of us had gone out together and that our lives had forever changed. For the better, he meant.

If Dave had read A Year of Magical Thinking, where the quote is from, he would have known that it is used by Didion to describe her husband's death. In painful detail, she writes about how the two sat down for dinner, what they were eating and drinking, what they were talking about. At one point, her husband stops speaking. She sees him, slumped over, silent, and, believing that he is choking, tries to move him so that she can do the Heimlich. He falls from his chair, hits his head on the table and lies motionless on the floor, blood pooling on the carpet. He is dead.

"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

Still, I was flattered and moved. I thought that Dave seemed deep because he was quoting literature to me. And caring because he remembered the name of my favorite author. And romantic. I didn't think much about context or meaning. I didn't wonder about a person who mistakenly uses a quote about death to describe the beginning of a relationship. It strikes me now, as I read the quote again, that it does not seem positive, even without context. It is about something sudden and abrupt that wipes out all of that which came before. If you are looking for that in a new relationship, you aren't looking for love. Love isn't something that you can use to erase your past. It's not an excuse or an explanation for the bad things you've done or will do. And it can't help you outrun yourself.

I remember the night that Dave broke up with me, five and a half years later. The details used to pain me but they don't anymore. I remember sitting down for dinner, which is when I realized what he was about to do. I remember what we were eating and drinking. He had steak and beer and I had nothing. We weren't talking about anything because we weren't speaking. Dave was concentrating on his meal, cutting his steak into pieces, and I was wondering how he could eat at a time like this.

The end was like the death scene Joan Didion describes, Dave slumped over on the couch, crying as he spoke his parting words. Me, motionless, next to him.

"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

And, sometimes, it's better that way.