If you've lost your loved one, you'll understand how difficult it is to feel romantic. Even when you're thinking about your life together, about how beautiful she was, how her eyes shone with starlight, and how her smile pulled you to her, the memories soon give way to reality. She is gone and she will never return.

How can a person move beyond the malaise of loss? I don't know. I've never experienced it before so there's nothing in my background to guide me. But I think about it a lot and I wondered today about goodbyes.

As I visualized scenes of past goodbyes, I began to formulate an idea. I finally phrased it this way:

Goodbyes are moments of revelation or illusion. In a reflective moment, we may wonder if the goodbye is permanent or if we may meet again someday.

Revelation occurs when we know with certainty that a reunification will never occur. Death is a prime example of revelation, although the revelation may not occur immediately.

Illusion is a state of mind dominated by fantasies and daydreams of an eventual reunification. When I think of this, I am reminded of an old song with a line or two that goes something like this:

We'll meet again, don't know where don't know when
but I know we'll meet again some sunny day.

When we say goodbye to a living person we can always hold out the hope that the person may return or we may go to them. But when we say our goodbyes to a departed individual, we know intellectually that unless we believe in an eventual reunification in heaven or in our version of heaven, we are in the realm of a very realistic revelation.

Sometime, if we are unable to separate the real (death) from the ideal (together forever in Heaven), we may exist in a twilight zone between revelation and illusion, alternating between states, existing in one state for a moment and then the other. I find myself in that twilight zone.

I don't know if we consciously choose these states or if the mind has a mind of its own. Those are matters for philosophers.

I don't even know if I will ever regain a sense of romanticism. The thought that I might look at another woman and feel the existence of a sense of romantic possibility, seems somehow unfaithful.

Maybe it's too soon after her departure. Only time and my moods will tell.