Renewal: Is Love Lovelier The Second Time Around?

“In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude…” – C.G. Jung, Civilization in Transition
Not yet light on the marshes. The white Ugg slippers I could not live without pad softly towards the kettle offering my morning potion of green jasmine tea. I look over my shoulder through large glass doors to see if my back yard neighbors are awake.
They live just over the watery back fence called Scotch Bonnet Creek, which continues to wind along its Wetlands Institute pathway to the Intercoastal waterway at our Stone Harbor Offices. No feathery neighbors in sight. I hover vacantly over the kettle until it bursts forth with a steamy whistle. Good. I can pour the hot water into my little teapot, short and stout, and begin my day.
I am reminded of the tiny shop in York, England that sold me the creamy white Wedgwood Queen’s Plain teapot just before I married John Edward Anderson seventeen and a half years ago on June 1st this year. I remember being engaged and looking forward to marriage, yet fearful of how many second marriages end in divorce.
It felt reassuring to honor this marriage with special wedding china selected for my second, and hopefully last, marriage on New Years Day, 1994. Shopping for a pattern befitting our mature marriage, I delighted in the tiny shops of York, where we traveled often.
The graceful curves of the Wedgewood greeted me from the window. When I learned that the china was named Wedgwood’s Queens Plain because no less than the Queen of England had selected it for her everyday china, the china was to be ours too.
At long last, a heavy carton arrived from the Wedgwood factory that specialized in seconds. I unpacked it joyfully, displaying it in our new Society Hill home, where it mingled cozily with colonial surroundings. The china became emblematic of my own renewal of marriage vows intended to be taken only once.
In 1991, just as I was designing the 25th anniversary party of my dreams, I had been thrown into cataclysmic disaster by the death of my husband 10 months before our anniversary. Now what? I had not dated in a quarter of a century. After one year of steadfast emotional hibernation from all men with dating intentions, and a second year of “getting to know the world, I emerged, two lifetimes and three calendar years later, with a brilliant, tall and handsome, rock solid groom to be.
Even the name was American as apple pie. I was to be named, of all things, Judith Anderson. Quite a leap from my original Russian identity as Judith Abbe Milner or my second life as cosmopolitan Dr. Judith Coche (with accent aigu on the e). This renewal invited becoming the Yankee wife of one of the original Mayflower families. Amazing.
So, at somewhere near the second half of my first century of life, I designed a long burgundy velvet strapless wedding gown, taught my South Dakota John Wayne how to fake a wedding waltz, and invited 150 guests to celebrate the second coming of 15-year-old Juliette Laura Coche’s Mom. In what just may be the shortest ceremony on record, John and I said “Youbet” as our three collective daughters stood nearby misty eyed. We meant it.
Reminiscing early on this May day and drinking tea from my not-so-plain Queen’s Plain, I feel a bond with the herons and egrets as they renew their challenging lives on our marshlands. The wedding vows first taken in 1966 prepared me a second round with a different groom. Life does indeed continue after death. And so does love.
Funny how life works: by thriving for decades with the first man of my dreams, I learned that the pain of letting one husband go actually paves the way for the freedom to love deeply again. As Jung informed us, a special part of myself guided me to a life renewal. The freshness of new love at a stage of maturity brought me the unforgettable lesson that it is indeed better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
To Consider: What about this springtime invites me to consider the power of renewal in my life? Which parts of myself can I deepen to enhance my own joy in living?
To Read: C. G. Jung. Modern Man In Search of a Soul. Harcourt Harvest. 1955
(Coche of Stone Harbor educates the public in mental health issues. She can be reached at tcctcs@earthlink.net or 215-735- 1908.)