The secret

Deb had a secret that she kept even from me.

She was always reluctant about most parts of her past. She would gladly talk about her grandmother, how she would sit next to her and play the piano. She told me she, like me, was an accidental baby, that her parents had gone to New Orleans and gotten tipsy, and ... oops.

But she kept most of her past under wraps. There were areas she wouldn't discuss, and in time I learned to let them be or risk being shut out entirely.

Not that learning where the limits were was easy. For instance, I told her about about my romantic past (such as it was), but she wouldn't talk about hers. She told me she had been married before and that it only lasted a year because he expected her to support him financially and they were living with his mother who was domineering. But she never talked about it beyond general details.

Whenever I asked about her other boyfriends, she'd deflect the question. "Why do you want to know? It doesn't affect us."

We both worked at the Colorado Springs Gazette at different times, and one day a co-worker let slip that she had gone out with another co-worker a couple of times, once to a Bob Dylan concert. Armed with this knowledge, I tried to see if I could get more details from her casually. I didn't go about it confrontationally with, "You went out with so-and-so, right?" I started a conversation about music and who we had seen in concert. After a bit, I said I'd always wanted to see Dylan, and she volunteered that she had seen him in Colorado Springs.

"Oh? With who?" I said, thinking I'd finally was going to get some insight into her past.

She named the co-worker.

"You went out with him? For how long?"

"Too long." She got up, and that was the end of the conversation.

After she died, I was going through her papers, and I found a notebook. It had addresses and little notes to herself. And it had some little pieces she had written.

I think everybody who aspires to be a writer writes little pieces that are really about themselves, but they write them as if they were writing about someone else. It's natural. When you write, you take from your own experiences and adapt them to the story.

This one started off with how the character's parents had gone to New Orleans and gotten tipsy and ... oops. So that's how I know she was writing about herself.

Then ... the secret.

Yes, she was writing it as fiction, and she might have made that part up, but from the other details in the piece and knowing her reluctance to talk about the past, I'm more than reasonably certain that it was true.

I won't reveal what it is. If she had wanted me to know, she would've told me. And I presume that if she hadn't told me, she wouldn't have told just anyone about it, only those who were really close to her. I'm not even sure her family knew.

Those who know it are no doubt keeping the secret as well. And I hope we always will because she obviously wanted it that way.

The fact that I found out her secret in this way doesn't diminish the fact that it IS something she wanted kept hidden, and I wouldn't betray her wishes. Not then, not now.

But the fact that she had kept a secret from me was crushing.

We'd had rough patches, like every couple did. One of the roughest was the religion discussion. Even though I don't go to church (I distrust organized religion) I still consider myself a Christian. One day she let slip that she considered herself an agnostic. That threw me for a loop. Because of my beliefs, I was afraid that meant eternity without her in the afterlife. It took a lot of discussion for us to find common ground, and she even got baptized to soothe my concerns about that. (I will always list that as the greatest and bravest thing she ever did for me)

So I understood why she wouldn't have told me. That didn't change the hurt I felt at the time, though. Why didn't she trust me, I wondered. Why didn't she have enough faith in my ability to accept this part of her past? We got over the religion thing, so we could've gotten over this. Didn't she know that?

It took a while to realize that this was another piece of unfinished business. She might have told me one day, if she felt comfortable that it wouldn't send our relationship into a death spiral. Or maybe she would've never told me. Or maybe she never would've told me, and we would've gone on to that front porch in Colorado into our nineties with my never knowing this about her.

Do we ever really know everything about our significant others? Do we really WANT to?

The main point is, it wouldn't have mattered in the end if she had told me or not told me. If she had, we would've gotten past it. If she hadn't, I never would've known and life would've gone on.

Like she said, "It doesn't affect us."

I wish I could tell her that. Hopefully, one day I can.