I took a class in the Greenfield YMCA yesterday, my first in a long time. As almost always happens, the sound system didn’t work and we moved to our own silent songs, led by a terrific instructor. Finally, someone brought an old-fashioned boom box, attached it to the sound system, and old-time rock’n’roll happily blared out, emboldening weightlifting and stretches.

Towards the end of the session, as we slowed down, the instructor changed the music to something quieter, and I suddenly heard, to my surprise, an opera aria sung by Pavarotti. I knew it right away, and I stopped moving. When the class ended five minutes later, I sat down on the adjoining chair and bent down, head in my hands.

I didn’t know the name of the aria, just that it was one of a series of arias appearing in Pavarotti’s CD called Te Adoro, all arias about love. I’d heard it the first time in a dentist’s office, of all places, and had asked the dentist what it was. He told me, I bought it, played it in the car, and always wept. This was after Bernie’s stroke. He will love this, I thought to myself. He always liked opera.

So one evening, late in 2017, when he was already able to make it up the stairs to our bedroom, he lay down in our bed and I put the CD into the computer on an adjoining stand. I lay next to him and we listened to aria after aria that sang of love, beauty, hope, passion, and also loss. He held me, I held him, and we listened quietly for the evening.

Pavarotti took us to some place we hadn’t experienced together in a long time. Each of us, I believe, had found our own path towards intimacy in this new, improbable situation, and our lives still beat in one cadence. But that evening took us towards this vision: Everything was no longer possible, but the deepest bond was still there. The music celebrated it everywhere; we knew it as truth.

I was sure he’d play it again and again, but he couldn’t figure out any longer how to work the computer and we never listened to it together again. I played it in my car CD player so often that I went through 2 CDs, each getting worn out and damaged till none were left, but we didn’t listen to it together, holding each other in bed, again.

Why not? I wondered as I sat on the chair in the gym, the others picking up their equipment and dispersing. Why not? We should have done that day after day as long as he’d lived. I was pierced by so much regret and sorrow. What was more important than a married couple, one severely ill, listening to gorgeous music that celebrated such deep human connection? As one Sufi sheik tells his disciples, “You can’t love Allah if you don’t love a human being.” Was writing more important? Teaching? Remembering what the house needed, or whether Stanley had had his walk that day?

The next class was filtering in, and slowly I came to my feet. Someone else had kindly and quietly returned my equipment to the big baskets in the corner. I picked up my chair and someone else, without my asking, put it away.

The pain subsided, but I was sad all day.

Today is a new day. I look out the window at the sun shimmering on the leaves. Some are changing color at their edges and remind me that this is it, the season that intersects life and death. The color here will be beyond words.

I’ll be tempted, October day after October day, to take photos of the back yard and the red and yellow maples bending towards the room in back, once Bernie’s office, then mine, now Lori’s bedroom since she remains downstairs, still bedridden six months after her terrible car accident. It has 6 windows plus a glass back door, and I tell her that opening her eyes each morning will be a revelation. She says nothing.

I’ll be tempted to take those photos, which you can see on postcards everywhere, because I want to catch the feeling of transience, the intersection of beauty and sadness that mark the long decline of the woods here. Why do I call it decline? Seen from the vantage of one moment, yes, but from a different vantage point, it’s just a change of clothes, as others have pointed out, so why take it to heart so much?

Because when that arrow stabs me, it doesn’t break me; instead, it expands everything inside. I feel—not just read about—how love and loss co-exist at the same time (one doesn’t follow the other, they exist simultaneously), and how past, present, and future all collapse into one presence.

So, when Zen masters point out that life and death are inextricably intertwined so why yield to grief and mourning, I reply: Because this opens up my consciousness of beauty more than anything else in the world, so let me welcome everything. If there’s sorrow, let it be. Regret (which is assumed to be a waste of time), let it be. A terrible missing of someone, let it be. Am I living in the past? Let it be. Are images flashing in my mind, distracting me from NOW? Let it be.

What results is a vast emotional landscape, so exquisite you’re afraid it will tear you apart, but it doesn’t. It really doesn’t.