“So, tell me what happened,” she says to me as we fumble with our heavy coats and unravel the scarves clinging tightly to our necks. The waiter has just shown us to our seat, a booth in the corner of one of the more popular restaurants in Chicago. I’m amazed at her ability to get us in at exactly the lunch hour, on a Friday during the last week of Lent when everyone else like us has seafood on their minds.
I tilt my head up to watch her study the menu. She with the grace and poise of a highly successful woman, a Senior Executive, more senior than me, older and more experienced. I observe the tousled gray hair that sits close to her head – a permanent souvenir, a battle scar from a year of illness. She was my epitome of strength and character, always doing the right thing, always standing up for what she believed in. And when she got sick, I wasn’t fazed by the physical changes that manifested themselves on the days that she continued to come in to the office. I knew she would beat it. Of all the people in the world, I just knew that she would.
The waiter returns to take our order and we engage in small talk for a while. Who’s new here, how is so and so? Don’t you miss so and so? And oh, how life is just so full of many changes! How about that new system? How is the project going?
And then she decides that I’ve delayed my answer for too long.
“So, what happened?” She asks once more. “For the most part of last year, I left you voicemail messages which you never answered. I watched you waste away, getting skinnier and skinnier everytime I saw you. And whenever I would ask you how you were, you’d tell me you were fine.”
“Fifteen pounds. I lost fifteen pounds.” I return her kind gaze with this admission. “I’ve gained some of it back, though.” This is the reason why I had asked her to lunch. I’m trying to face those who I’d abandoned, those who could’ve helped. “I got sick. I think I got sick. I woke up one day and no longer wanted to do everything for everybody. I didn’t want to feed the dog, take care of the children, pay the bills. After 25 years, I didn’t want to be married anymore.”
“Oh,” she answers with the saddest eyes I had ever seen. “How are you now? Are you better?”
“I think I am,” I answer. “I’m still working on myself.”
“Shiny Objects.”
“What?” I ask.
“You got caught up in shiny objects.” She said with a half-smile. “Everyone does at some point in their lives. Especially strong women like us. Successful, intelligent, independent women who do it all. And then add the cuteness factor in there, and the shiny objects come after you.”
I laugh at her last statement. What a coincidence to have just finished reading “Adultery” by Paul Coelho. That book shone a mirror on the feelings that I had bottled up inside. I was Linda and he was Jacob. And despite the hundreds of times I had tried to say goodbye, each one was better than the last. I’m almost there. If I were to place a date on it, I would be betting on the month of April.
“I think I did.”
“Listen, don’t beat yourself up over it. I think it’s because you have been trying so hard to do the right thing all your life. Being an author, having a different persona from the one that you live every day – I think that they’re finally merging into one and you’re trying desperately to keep them separate. Everyone is entitled to make mistakes, and for as long as you grow and learn from those mistakes, you always emerge a better person. Don’t let the guilt of what happened eat you up. You are a wonderful person. You’ve raised wonderful children, given them everything they could ask for, and you are an outstanding member of our company. That is the person that you are.”
I’m at a loss for words. I want to cry from relief. She continues to speak in a low, loving tone.
“Those shiny objects, they don’t last. Like everything else, their magic dies down and you will be left with the same thing that you were trying to run away from. But at the same time, I’m telling you this, I want you to know that only you can decide when to turn away and go back to your family. And you will because you are good. As Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.’ Your tree is solid. Your character is strong. And if your basis lives in good, then you’re the same person that you always were, and no one will ever doubt that about you.”
I will hold these words close to my heart. And when I walk away from that shiny object, I will always remember the role that it played in my life.
