Seeking the Rosetta Stone: A Life-long Quest for the “Why?” in a lost love…

First, a little backstory:

Back in the late 1970s and early 80s, I was working for Alameda County (Oakland, CA) as its ‘Cardiopulmonary Program Coordinator’ (a fancy $20 title that more practically translates into a $10 “Multitasking Miracle Worker” position) for the county’s Highland General Hospital and Trauma Center.

For those of you who are not highly trained, long-time medical professionals, this is and was effectively the ‘Cook County’ experience relocated to the West Coast (California’s San Francisco Bay Area). Chicago’s Cook County Hospital (formally the John H. Stroger Hospital of Cook County, Illinois) was begun back in 1857, at which time it was used as a teaching facility for the Rush Medical School; when the American Civil War began, it was pressed into service as a Union Army medical treatment center until war’s end. In 1866 it offered the very first ‘medical internship’ ever in the post-war United States. Thus, it has a very long and storied history as one of the founding institutions upon which the modern American medical (health care) system was established.

All modern medical professionals know about Cook County''s Hospital and Trauma Center and are aware of that institution’s general reputation and history, especially the fact that it treats an extremely wide range of patients (although generally less well-to-do, indigent individuals who are reliant on Cook County services for their most basic health care needs). The mere mention of the phrase ‘Cook County’ raises eyebrows and prompts knowing looks, for to say something is a ‘Cook County case’ is generally an in-code term implying an extraordinary medical case presentation in extremis.

Most county-run medical facilities all over America today provide clinical and hospital care for economically indigent (well before any system such as ‘Medicare’ or ‘Medical-Cal’ (et al) existed); this role fell to them as a requisite for receiving Federal Hill-Burton Act fund disbursements, that act stipulating that one of the primary conditions for receiving Hill-Burton Act funding was that the recipient institution agree to dedicate at least a certain percentage of its annual services to medically indigent individuals for a period of no less than 20 years, subsequent to receiving Hill-Burton grants. This was later modified over the years until it became Title XVI of the Public Health Service Act.

At any rate, as Alameda County’s ‘Cardiopulmonary Program Coordinator’, it was my job to operate both the pulmonary functions lab at Highland and the cardiac catheterization lab. While that sounds rather fancy and ‘high-fallutin’ on the surface of things, it was perhaps best described by a Highland Administrator named Susan R., who referred to the entirety of its myriad complexities as ‘a one-man job’. That appellation was quite accurate in that I was the only person involved in providing both pulmonary function diagnostics AND cardiac catherization support for all in-patients and clinical patients who had been referred for either service’s diagnostic evaluation.

Given the wide ranging needs of the clients (and the fact that we provided diagnostic services for insolvent county residents…many of whom were substance abusers and/or mental health cases…and the inmates of the very large Alameda County Correctional Facility at Santa Rita, there was little time for anything other than rushing around all day, juggling a variety of tasks that ranged from making appointments (there was no secretary or ‘office help’ for me) to measuring cardiovascular data and actively monitoring patient vital-signs during sometimes quite lengthy cardiac diagnostic procedures (invasive hemodynamics, etc.). Since we did everything from routine coronary angiography to valve replacement surgical assessments (quite complex), it was engaging, demanding and intensive work.

When I was providing cardiac catheterization services, I was putting pulmonary patients through elaborate pulmonary function diagnostic procedures (a typical visit entailed spirometry, ‘lung volumes’, arterial blood gas analysis and CO diffusion capacity assays) and also providing assistance for fiberoptic bronchoscopy procedures…both for outpatients and critical care patients. In short, I REALLY earned my salary at Highland.

Among my other duties (the infamous ‘All other duties as assigned’ catch-all stipulation in formal job descriptions) was helping train medical and surgical interns and resident staff in both the cardiology and pulmonary departments.

I suppose, looking back, I was quite fortunate to have as my immediate chiefs, two near-legendary Bay Area doctors named Walter S. (Cardiology Chief) and Herb S. (Pulmonary Medicine Chief). Both were highly regarded by both attending and resident staff and set an extremely high standard of medical training for all interns and residents who rotated through their departments, as part of their post-doc training. The interns and residents at Highland, despite being run ragged by the post-doc training regimen, had only positive things to say about the extent of their exposure to the basic cardiology and pulmonary techniques and procedures all post-docs must familiarize themselves with. [Again, as an aside to those who are not familiar with the medical physician training system, American physician training requires roughly a minimum of 4 additional years of additional clinical and hospital-based training after graduation from medical school in order to be eligible to sit for specialty certification by the American Medical Association. These 4 years begin with a one-year internship, followed by from 3 to 6 additional years of specialised further training in chosen specialties; intricate specialties such as neurosurgery are among the most demanding and lengthy, understandably).

A coincident singularity…

At any rate, it was in the course of my work at Highland that I met the woman whom I to this day believe was ‘that one special woman’ I was unreservedly willing and prepared to make my wife…the one woman I was profoundly in love with and whom I regarded as the most exquisite creature I’ve ever known. This was a Chinese (from the PRC) intern named Rose X.

Rose came through my labs one day shortly after she had arrived from her medical school graduation (at Peter Ben Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts, a long-established and famed institution back East) to begin this phase of her post-doc work. I was immediately smitten by her, since she was not just lovely to look at but had a frightfully intense intelligence, not to even mention her other assets which included drive, commitment and dedication to her chosen professional calling.

Rose was, you see, what we call a ‘paper daughter’. For those of you who do not know much Chinese-American history, the infamous ‘Chinese Exclusion Act’, passed in 1882 by America’s legislature to keep ‘orientals’ out of the United States, had a phenomenally xenophobic impact on America’s demographics of the late 1800s. Another shameful part of our nation’s flagrantly racist past that deserves much wider awareness than has heretofore obtained among our population, prejudice against the hard-working Chinese immigrants in the late 19th Century was such that popular sentiment demanded that they be kept out (ostensibly so as to not provide ‘cheap’ competition for American workers in the mines, on the railroads, in factories and in other occupations). These unfortunates were increasingly physically mistreated, sometimes suffering death at the hands of unruly crowds of whites.

And what is a ‘paper daughter’ you might ask? This is a term that described a dodge that the ever-canny Chinese developed to circumvent the 1882 exclusion act. The way it worked was simple: if a Chinese person living outside the United States wished to gain ‘legal’ entry, he would claim that he was the offspring of a Chinese person already in the country (who had returned, if only briefly, to China ostensibly to look for and bring back a suitable wife). Since there was no effective way of knowing whether the claimant was a legitimate relative or not, there was a very good chance that they would be accepted if they simply claimed to be a son or daughter of that individual. Thus, ‘on paper’ they were legitimate relatives and proving otherwise was both legally arduous and time-consuming for American immigration officials.

When the archives containing previous records of entry and citizenship burned up in a fire at the Ellis Island Immigration Service facility in the late 1800s, it became almost impossible to legally contest a ‘paper son or daughter’ in their claim to be a relative of a US citizen.

Rose was one of these…a ‘paper daughter’…whose actual family name was (and this is a hypothetical surname, not her actual surname) Song. Her immigration application claimed she was the daughter of an unrelated stranger whose surname was Fong.

Rose was successful in her bid to be permitted legal entry as Fong’s daughter and thus settled initially in New York City, where she maintained this convenient and familiar fiction in New York’s massive China Town. As a bright and highly motivated young woman, Rose set about learning the English language and soon mastered it well enough to attend college in New York, earning her way by maintaining several part-time jobs and also being awarded scholarships for academic excellence.

She confided to me at one time that she had back then been converted to radical left-wing political thinking back and had been dating an outspoken ‘Young Maoist’ radical who held extreme leftist views about China and Mao Tsedung’s regime (this was in the late 60s/early 70s, before the People’s Republic formally resumed friendly/normal relations with the West).

When I met her, I have to admit that I also was somewhat of a leftist, who believed that American involvement with the Republic of China (Taiwan, or ROC) was wrong-headed, and favored US recognition of Communist China as the ‘true’ China. Interestingly enough, I frequently visited San Francisco’s well-known East Wind Bookstore, where a range of PRC literature (propaganda, if you will) was available; I even had several copies of Mao’s Little Red Book (I still have them) and I was quite interested in what has been called the indigenous Chinese ‘barefoot doctor’ health-care system.

I was therefore doubly impressed by Rose…by not just her innate intelligence, but by her personal perseverance, dedication to hard work and academic excellence. Of course, it would be grossly unfair to omit the fact that she was exactly the sort of woman I had long been searching for: an exceptional and quite pretty woman of Asian extraction! Furthermore, I had long admired the Confucian heritage of the Chinese people, with its many admirable traditions that placed family and children at the center of social concerns.

Rose had a tendency to be a bit serious and occasionally mildly laconic in her affect, but when she smiled it was one of the most genuine smiles I have ever been blessed to experience…not unlike the sun bursting through a Marin Headlands fogbank on Mount Tamalpais. And, since I am not immune to the charms of a well-proportioned, graceful Asian woman, her slightly ‘Northern China’ visage and cute little nose won me over on first sight. Oh yes, I was hooked for sure, and taking advantage of my role as resident ‘tutor’ in cardiopulmonary clinical methods and techniques, I had plenty of time with her in the hospital to cultivate a more serious relationship that I hoped would continue to grow and culminate in marriage!

As our relationship grew, I took her along on some of my weekend trips to the Sierra Nevada mountains (which was quite new and exciting for her, being an ‘East-coaster’) and we also went on regular trips to my ‘Naturefreunde Touristenverein’ club on the flanks of Marin’s wonderful Mount Tamalpais. We were soon dating seriously (she lived in San Francisco with a Japanese-American intern at Highland named ‘Kimi’, while I continued to live in Berkeley, north of the UCB campus at 1309 Spruce Street).

I had a full-grown, adopted Alaskan Malamute at that time named Chugach and we took a few Sierra trips with big, wonderful and goofy Chugach. Rose seemed to love him as much as did I and he reciprocated. Believe me, when the woman you’re seeing seems to like Northern Breed dogs as much as you do, that’s one VERY special lady, in my book!

Another wonderful aspect of Rose’s nature was her natural, charming adeptness with kids. We had a neighbor couple (he was Jewish and she was Chinese) whose young daughter was named Shannon. Rose would occasionally take Shannon and her little friend ‘Wheat’ (yep, strange name, but that’s what it was!) up to the Berkeley Hills on windy days to fly kites; at such moments, I felt a strong desire to have my own children with her! The pictures I took of such outings instantly plunge me into the most profound of melancholias whenever I view them, today!

Meanwhile, I had relocated to a Solano Avenue address which was owned by the brother of one of my good amigos named Steve (Steve and I had previously begun our post military service civilian jobs under a pulmonologist named Mitchell T., who was one of the very first to establish a pulmonary medicine department in the East San Francisco Bay (this was at the former ‘Providence Hospital’ site that occupied a site on Oakland’s ‘Pill Hill’, now part of Summit Medical Center, along with what were formerly Merritt and Peralta Hospitals). Steve’s brother was a rather truculent house-mate, but Steve and I both lived with him occupying different rooms; he was a teacher by academic training (who now lives on Oahu, HI).

Eventually, Rose and I became a solid couple and when she told me she had bought a home near Highland Hospital, we moved into it together. Looking back, I can see now that Rose wasn’t too keen on the fact that as a military historian, I had a few aircraft ejection seats in our garage; she failed to see the need for any such artifacts and had no interest whatsoever in either military history, aviation or my French-German ancestry (all areas of particular interest to me, of course). However, that was a rather small area of disagreement.

Thomas Malthus Enters the Equation

At one point (I think it was in the middle of her first year of residency), Rose informed me that she was pregnant! Although that was a shock, since she was taking ‘the pill’, it came as a somewhat upsetting revelation, since she couldn’t afford to interrupt her all-important residency by having a child! Her decision was, probably quite logically, given her situation, to have a D&C (that is, to have the baby aborted) and without any further inputs from or reference to me, that is exactly what she did in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Although I certainly well-appreciate and fully understand her reasons for making that decision, to this day I still harbor a profound sense of loss and regret over that incident. I have never gotten over it, especially since as a child who was deprived of my own father when I was only 4 years old, I had always felt I would have made a fantastic father…and one who both knew and appreciated how important it is for a child to have a strong, supportive male role-model in his/her early life. Over the years, I’ve written endlessly about that moment in my life and I will probably die still reflecting on how melancholy a turn of events that was for me, who otherwise has never had any children of my own!

As our life together continued as the 80s began, living together at her home near the hospital, we occasionally discussed our plans for the future together but as someone who is inherently cautious about the others I am involved with, I made no straightforward declarations of an intent to marry and was for the moment quite content so simply continue as living ‘partners’. Looking back on all this with the benefit of the acute clarity enabled by hindsight, I can see that Rose’s biological clock was ticking madly down. She was now in her early 30s and although nearly ready to begin her professional medical life as a physician, her internal ‘schedule’ left little room for indecision and uncertainty, in so far as marriage and a ‘family’ was concerned. I suspect that my rather casual attitude towards marriage at that point was a sore point with her, since there was little room for vacilation in the life of someone so committed to a carefully titrated life-schedule such as hers was.

I was then still working at Highland (I hadn’t gone to Saudi Arabia yet, since that stage of my life was prompted by our not long-off breakup…a sort of joining the French Foreign Legion to forget, as I later characterised it). I was also a bit bothered by the fact that while she was now a fully fledged doctor of medicine, I was still only a mere technologist with no particularly advantaged future to look forward to. When I discussed this with Rose, she had reassured me that what I did for a living was no concern of hers in the sense that it did not adversely affect how she felt about our life together. That was reassuring, certainly, but perhaps a bit too reassuring, since realistically we would exist in different and distinct ‘social classes’ as ‘doctor’ and ‘technologist’ andI was acutely aware of this.

The fates throw me a fast curveball

And then at about this time, a strange thing occurred. Apparently, a young law school student at UC Berkeley had come by the house one day, asking if there was anything around the house that needed attention (such as lawn work, minor construction/remodeling, gardening, etc.). I paid little attention to this, leaving it to Rose to handle, and so this student soon became a sort of fixture, installing a deck in the back yard, doing some plumbing repairs and so forth. I accepted this as nothing out of the ordinary…until one weekend when Rose told me that she and some of her ‘friends’ at the hospital (I inferred this meant a few of the other female residents) would be taking our VW combi camper to Big Sur for the weekend. This was the Berkeley/Bay Area of the 70s and 80s, after all, and I was perfectly agreeable to let her cultivate her own friends as she saw fit and accepted this as a straight forward matter. I certainly was NOT a macho, possessive individual…typical ‘liberated’ male of that era, I guess (so I thought).

Came the weekend in question and she left with the bus to join her ‘friends’ in Big Sur. On the second day of her holiday away, I just happened to open our bureau to get a T-shirt and noticed with some curiosity that her swimming suit was missing from the drawer. But let me explain: she had come out from New York with this horrible old, baggy cotton swimming suit that looked like something Charlie Chaplin would have worn for one of his ‘at the beach’ skits, back in the 30s. It was absolutely disreputable to an extreme, but being modest by nature, she wore that old rag whenever a swim was in the offing. I was almost ashamed to see it on such a lovely figure as hers.

Accordingly, one day several months earlier, I had gone to a local sporting goods and purchased a new suit for her. With her uniquely attractive light-ochre Chinese skin tone, I had found the perfect suit to compliment her excellent, slender figure: an emerald green Nylon/Spandex ‘tanksuit’ (such as competition swim-team racers wear) that fitted her perfectly proportioned body like she was poured into it! Actually, I was quite proud of having selected that suit for her (I have excellent taste in that department!), but she seldom if ever had an opportunity to swim, so it had remained in that bureau drawer for months, untouched. Yet…suddenly and mysteriously it was not in the drawer and I had to conclude (logically enough) that she had taken it with her to Big Sur. Still, not any big deal, I thought…but exceeding curious!

After three or so days, she returned, obviously quite pleased with her holiday down on the coast and in a great mood to plunge back in to the dreadfully demanding hospital residency routine! For my part, I was happy that she had been able to release all the intense pressures that a residency at Highland burdens young doctors with so completely!

Not long after her return, I brought up the suit matter and asked her how her friends had reacted, how they had liked it? At this point, being a very honest person and not one to dissemble or obfuscate, Rose finally leveled with me and told me that she had met the law student down there, and the rest of the story was easy to figure! That was the beginning of the end of our oh-so-promising relationship and I chided her that it was positively reprehensible to have had ‘an affair’ with that guy while we were living together in the same home! My strong sense of honor felt completely, totally and devastatingly betrayed and I immediately started to look for an apartment somewhere else into which to move.

For her part, Rose offered no explanation at all about why she had betrayed my trust and love so completely…none! I could NOT, for the life of me, understand what had motivated her to so clearly and deceively break faith with me, for I am, if nothing else, a person possessed of a STRONG sense of personal honor and integrity. This was more than a reprehensible breech of conjugal and spiritual commitment, as far as I was concerned; it was simultaneously ruinous and personally quite hurtful. No single thing could, as I see things, be more hurtful to me than for a lover to break faith so completely, in a manner so duplicitous and irrevocably dishonorable! (I’m afraid I’m just an old-fashioned guy in that context.)

To culminate the actual circumstances involved here, suffice it to say that I was out of the house within a few days and moved into a small, cheap apartment on a somewhat disreputable part of Grove Street (now named…of course!...Martin Luther King Way in Berkeley).

Within another month, my pride still reeling, I had accepted a position at a cardiac cath-lab in Saudi Arabia (about as far away as I could get, by my reckoning) and that was the functional end of what had had seemed to me to be THE single most promising relationship I’ve ever entered into in my entire life! I''m convinced no real Foreign Legionaire had ever wanted to forget as much as I did, at that time!

This was over 38 years ago, but I never, ever fully got over this…particularly due to the fact that Rose had never offered ANY reason why she had treated me in this callous manner, after all the mutual assumptions of a wonderful future life together. To this day I still ruminate over this inexplicable turn of events and I still have sleepless nights when this particular ghost (a zombie wraith if ever there was one) periodically crawls out of the crypt of untoward memories to haunt my dreams, some 38 years after the event!

However, having recently hit the 7th decade mark of my life, I’ve recently intensively reexamined all these things in a final effort to make some sense of it and also perhaps to bring about a sense of closure that has been denied me for almost 4 decades now!

A theory about what happened

I was, back then, while at Highland Hospital, rather naively unaware of the fact that so many of the professional medical people in the San Francisco East Bay were of the Jewish faith. Although I have strong interests in French and German history and culture (due to having maternal ancestors of these backgrounds), and although as a military historian I have always had a keen academic awareness of the Jewish ‘Shoah’ (or ‘Holocaust’), I had never given much thought to the fact that a great number of the leading medical professionals in the East Bay were Jewish. Both my two Highland department heads were not just Jewish (from New York), but members of the same synagogue! The same is true for my former Chief at Providence, Dr. Mitch T., and the Chief of Medicine at Highland, Dr. Hunter C., who was also responsible for many of the teaching programs for interns and residents there. I will refrain from alluding to this as the East Bay Jewish ‘mafia’, since that would be somewhat scurrilous and merely an unproven assumption, but the point that should be remain salient is that the Hebrew faith exerted a VERY strong influence at Highland.

Mind you, these individuals were and are excellent and wonderful people; I had the greatest respect for them, while working there, but now that I look back on all this it seems pretty obvious that privately, amongst themselves, I must have been deemed somehow ‘unsuitable’ and unacceptable as a suitor for my lovely, charming Rose. This suspicion is further reinforced by the fact that one of Rose’s fellow residents (and a close friend), one ‘Linda X’, was also very Jewish and may have exerted some significant personal influence on Rose to ‘find someone more suitable for you'' (and her elevated professional standing in life).

More compelling circumstantial evidence: Although not a doc myself, I occasionally attended some of the casual intern/resident social affairs, since I and Rose were a couple. One in particular I now well recall was a Halloween party, held at one of the attending physician’s homes in the Oakland Hills. This may have been Dr. C.’s home, I can’t recall with any certainty, but for my costume I had dressed up as a WW2 Luftwaffe ‘Battle of Britain’ fighter pilot, in full kit and even wearing a German vintage parachute. I distinctly recall that this was not well received by those at the party and I also recall the undisguised looks of disapprobation that Rose’s friend Linda X had darted at me, thus outfitted. I couldn’t understand why, of course, until I later factored it all into the retro-perspective overview that 38 years has afforded me, but there it seemed to be!

I, in all innocence, have long been a tyro dilettante in German cultural affairs (such as the Turnverein and the Naturefreunde Touristenverein, not to mention several European Alpine Clubs) and the events and circumstances that befell Germany during the years of the Third Reich I regard merely as a fascinating (if deplorably tragic) epoch inherently worthy of study; people of the Jewish faith obviously have a far more profoundly intimate and adverse emotional outlook on this subject!

While we all got along quite perfectly at the hospital, I strongly suspect that both Walter S. (Cardiology Chief) and Herb S. (Pulmonary Chief), along with (Chief of Medicine) Hunter C., Linda X (resident) and possibly some others had made the private decision that I was definitely not suitable for Rose (who was, after all, one of their chief resident proteges, having excelled in all her training since her medical school days).

Thus, my final conclusion is that subtle but ultimately quite effective social/peer ‘pressure’ was put on Rose to divest herself of my acquaintance, and when the young law student (who may have been referred to Rose by Linda X, in fact…I forget) suddenly appeared, asking if there was any work around the house that he could do, it may have been in actual fact a thinly disguised effort to give Rose a compelling reason to take some positive action in this matter.

Viewed objectively, this student was, in fact, a reasonably good-looking fellow and certainly would theoretically make a better economic match for Rose as a soon-to-graduate law student with a JD and a future professional career in the legal profession! Looking at all these pieces of the puzzle now, it all fits so perfectly together! And such, I must conclude, are the sub rosa mechanisms that resulted in the rupture of our relationship, so I must conclude!

As a follow-up note, it is interesting to observe that this fellow (named Mike) and Rose did in fact end up marrying each other and have a family consisting of two wonderful young daughters (one a natural daughter and the other adopted from China). They have a home in Oakland quite near Rose’s original home near the hospital, where the former law student now has a home-based legal practice. Rose, for her part, recently retired from a major healthcare HMO we are all familiar with, after a successful career as a primary care and family practice physician.

I may have lost the lady of my dreams, but…

And so they, at least, ended up having a happy and fulfilled life together…not that that brings much consolation to me, of course. I can’t help but feel that I was sadly duped and unfairly treated, given my passionately strong love for Rose…a love that continues to this day as another of those classical tragedies that fall into the ‘unrequited love’ category that worked so well as a masterful creative impetus for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Wm. Shakespeare!

And for many years thereafter I was racked with doubt and uncertainties about why exactly Rose had left me so unexpectedly. Had I somehow been lacking as a sexual partner? Was I being spurned due to having a somewhat ‘lower’ social’ status (as a non-MD)? Had I been the victim of a sub-rosa (no pun intended, but it seems somehow apt) social conspiracy on the part of the others in our mutual Highland circles? I was regularly wracked by these self-doubts much as would be a piece of cheese dropped inadvertently on the kitchen floor, near a mouse hole and there had never been any sort of explanatory ‘closure’ to allay them.

I hasten to add that I do not bear any grudges whatsoever towards any of the individuals mentioned here, but it certainly does convey to me several insightful and very possible suspicions: Chief among them is an awareness of the immense and extraordinary sense of cohesiveness that individuals of the Jewish faith (who are quite insular as both a social and religious faith, of course) have and can exert, when and where it suits their need. But to even infer such ideas invites accusations of bias, prejudice, racism and other divisive elements in our present leftist-progressive culture, of course, so I risk all that by dredging this all up and openly laying it out for others to see as I have here. I am, after all, simply trying to finally make some rational sense of what has always remained inexplicable to me!

I certainly am not unique in suffering through all this; small personal catastrophes like this have taken place between star-crossed lovers for thousands of years, of course, but since each of us only has the one single life (as far as we are able to ascertain), we by necessity cling to, what may have little immediate relevance for many of you remains a near-crippling emotional disaster for me, as a vested ‘romantic’ of the first water.

As for lovely Rose, I still regard her as one of the truly major loses of my life, despite the fact that I myself have now been happily married to another wonderful woman (also Chinese) for almost 34 years! I so wish Rose could have leveled with me when I sought an answer from her as to how this all could have come about, but if any of my suspicions are at all true, this is not the sort of ‘influence’ that can be easily or even safely brought to the surface in today’s culturally diverse environment or even casually discussed, given the reaction it will surely provoke. How well I know that some things are perhaps best left entombed and interred in the crypt of passing time…but I shall continue to wonder about all this to the day I die! I hope you will forgive me for sharing this, as I have, but I seem to have been born wearing my heart (as the old saying has it) ‘on my sleeve’…

In the end…

I think I shall always and forever carry a still-sharp sliver of that intense, yet failed love lodged inextricably in my heart to my last dying breath…

The following brief selection (below), taken from the ‘Poems of Abraham Cowley’, seems to sum the tragic complexities of what I experienced all up quite succinctly. Given that Crowley was such a complex, multifaceted  individual, this may seem a bit odd, but it fits perfectly, nevertheless.

“A mighty pain to love it is,

And ‘t is a pain that pain to miss;

But of all pains, the greatest pain

It is to love, but love in vain.”

― Abraham Cowley (1698), The Poems of Abraham Cowley