My sister had given a small wooden sign to her three children and me. Because the message read, “The trouble is you think you have time,” most of us hung the $2.99 tchotchke close to a clock. The two companions lived well together, in all the different households.
One might wonder if her affinity for the inscribed message was an angel whisper of upcoming heartbreak, or even of her own demise. But I think not, because she used the guidepost for both joy and misfortune. “Make a new memory” was her trademark maxim. She lived urgently.
By the end of 2019, I was using her maxim to enrich my own life. I declared that I was happy living my adventurous and free single life. When I stretched out my life plan to the end, I saw no “‘significant other” in the journey, so I made a point to jam the important and daring into my life box first, not waiting for a partner with whom to share any of it. So I was a little surprised when Bothwell, my now-husband, showed up toward the end of that year, and I accidentally fell in love.
I posted a Christmas card on December 18 that read “I love you, Bothwell.” Several times before, he had expressed that he loved me, but I’d never responded in kind. I needed to write the declaration before I said it, thus illustrating my shyness as vividly as an Irving Penn fashion shot.
I hastily sealed the card and dropped it in the mailbox before I lost my nerve. I then headed to the airport for my Missouri Christmas.
On December 27, upon my return to New York, he told me, from his home in Maryland, that he was saying goodbye. He could not see a way forward for our relationship.
I had acknowledged the new love I had found, after ten years of widowhood, only to lose it nine days later.
I now look back on the New Year’s Day of 2020 and ask myself if I would have preferred to know the new dreadful story that would unfold in that upcoming year. I have concluded that I would have chosen to know that both my oldest nephew and sister would die, that Bothwell would call again, and that my life would take a turn that I heretofore could have never imagined.
We live differently when we know that tragedy is imminent, when we are certain we do not have time. We snuggle close to little moments that would otherwise whiz by without notice. If I’d known my sister’s destiny on that New Year’s Day, I would have been with her more, I would have touched her more, and I would have talked on the phone with her for as long as she pleased.
Her passing, my renewed relationship with Bothwell, and her little left-behind sign that I take in several times a day brought me to a new way of living.
I now make a point to laugh. I make a point to do the things that are important to Bothwell and me. I care much less about what other people think.
When I became engaged in 2021, someone asked me if I intended to plan a big wedding. I stuck my chin up in the air and responded, “Why not?”
We did what we wanted to do, not necessarily what tradition dictated. We aspired to make our wedding more than the vows of two people committing to love each other forever. We aimed for a lesson of sorts, that we’d learned through the joy and the pain of our 2020 year, so I sat down at my computer and pounded out the Dream Catcher story.
Bothwell insisted that I read the piece aloud, which was a tricky venture to pull off, considering that a bride doesn’t stand in her gown greeting the guests; much less do a long reading. So, we recorded the following in our living room, while the wedding planner flitted from the back of the room to the front, covering 10,000 steps in an hour. She wanted it shorter and Bothwell demanded that not a syllable be cut. Bothwell prevailed.
So on November 12, 2022, here’s how the beginning of our wedding went down.
One hundred and four wedding guests were assembled in the Pavilion of the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Florida. A string quartet played classics as a prelude to the expected and routine exchange of marriage vows.
And then, the room turned quiet and the air circled strange.
There was to be no “expected.”
A voice, not known, came from what seemed like the heavens, but call it the sound system, transported from New York.
For the night had turned different.
There, in that void, the bride’s voice made an entrance.
Penetrating the twilight, the Dream Catcher was read.
Dream Catcher
The American Indians believe that dream catchers, those windchime-shaped nets with a hole in the center, filter dreams. Good dreams are allowed to pass through and waltz along with our sleep trances, while the bad ones are held back and dissolved by the early morning light.
I saw my first dream catcher in an outdoor San Diego marketplace. I went with Kelly, my stepson’s wife, and Jamie, his daughter.
It was one of those brilliant, bright days that can make you believe everything, forever, will be just right.
Later that year, they gave me a dream catcher as a 2019 Christmas gift.
I hung it carelessly on the lock closure of my NYC bedroom window. Before sliding into bed at night, I looked out over the Hudson River, from my high rise, and fingered the shells that dangled from the yarn filter.
I ended 2019 with the optimism of a child running through Salinger’s rye field.
It was only a few days after the 2020 year started that Bothwell and I parted ways.
Later that same year, my nephew, John, barely past 50, died from a cancer, that had been hiding behind his heart. It tore through his body in an unyielding rampage, that left him lifeless just 30 days later.
His mother, my sister and best friend, Helen, passed away 158 days later, from Covid.
Some say it was more broken heart than Covid.
“I have a hole in my middle that I cannot fill,” she whispered into the phone to me one morning.
At that point I should have considered a filter change on my fragile dream catcher. But I was too heartbroken to think in any sort of clever or funny way like that.
I was listless. I watched the clock snip away at time and was glad when yet another day was behind me.
But as everyone now knows, Bothwell had called again, in the spring of that rotten year.
They say that God doesn’t reach for us in our high-flying times. He often shows up when grief has stuck us in the gut, and we’re not sure we are going to live. I reached for God when Helen died, and God put Bothwell’s hand on top of mine.
2020 was a callous year for everyone. It coursed through our lives, swiping away comfortable little habits and routines that had run on auto-pilot for years.
When we bumped into their absence, we “made do.”
And we teetered there on the edge of that “make do,” til it became a new, but weird normal, stepping one step forward when we thought it was all over, and two steps back again when a new variant arrived.
Some of us began to wonder if reliable daylight would ever return.
But slowly, we began to breathe in a few particles of familiar air.
In small groups we began to regather. The brave of us went to parties of ten, all masked up like bank robbers.
We were relieved when we came home alive and still well.
One of those atypically small such gatherings was a Princeton University reunion.
On May 22, 2021, the noteworthy event there, was an assembly of two in a Nassau Inn suite. Unmasked and vulnerable, Bothwell slid from the sofa onto one knee.
“You know I would do almost anything for you,” he began.
He asked if I would do ONLY ONE thing for him.
“I need you to marry me,” he said.
A millisecond later, I said, “of course.”
Since then, we have been preparing for our wedding day.
Today.
Now it is quite a slap at tradition to plan such a large affair considering our circumstances. We have each been married before, and we are slightly older than the average bride and groom. Ya think?
But here is the way we feel about it…
If the bad stuff, like pandemics and lockdowns, can steal grandma visits, Christmas dinners, and bedside farewells to dying loved ones, then some of our good stuff can take a determined, tough slug at long-held wedding traditions.
Bothwell and I are grateful for the love call we have been given in our out-of-order lives. We hope everyone will remember their own blessings while they celebrate this special evening with us.
We are naïve to believe that the dream catcher can filter all the heartbreak and pain; innocent to trust that daylight can dissolve all the nightmares.
Better to celebrate the lovely dreams, big or small, that pass through and make their way to us.
Celebrate OFTEN. Celebrate BIG. Celebrate NOW.
We thank you for celebrating this perfect moment with us.
We never imagined we would catch a blessing so fine.
Our fondest wish is that lovely dreams slip into your own lives and surprise you with extraordinary happiness.
WITH LOVE,
LYNNE & BOTHWELL
Barefaced Living is a monthly column on the art of beginning again by former C-suite beauty executive, recovering workaholic, and 70-year-old bride Lynne Greene. Click here to read more about Lynne. Last month’s column was devoted to the life-changing mentorship of Ida Stewart at Estée Lauder.
by embracing our own mortality we learn how to live.
❤️
Blessed to have witnessed this wonderful event and hear The Dream Catcher in person. I am so grateful as this is a love story like no other :)