Loomings

I just called my wife now and heard the little beep at the end of each ring, which tells me she is on the other line. When she clicked over she told me she had been speaking with her mother. There is no one she talks to more than her mother, who is in many ways her best friend. My wife is an only child, and so the thing that worries me the most about my stance on IVF is the effect it will have on her, not just now, but in the future.

My wife essentially has three people in this world who are hers: her parents and her husband. Her relatives live far away, her friends are simply friends. When her parents die, most especially her mother, she will have lost a great deal that I alone, however good a husband I may be, will not be able to replace. She will have lost a link to her blood family, a link that has not been recreated or echoed in a new member of that family.

Love for one's child is a different kind of love, but a more analagous kind of love to love for one's parent, I would think, than love for one's spouse. A child is someone to whom one can pass on memories of grandparents and culture and tradition. The child can share the same kind of identification with those things that the parent can, and the child can carry those things on beyond the parent's death, beyond even his own death, by handing them down to yet another generation. The spouse can do neither, and so is less of a consolation in such times. And should I die before her, she will be alone indeed.

This vision of coming pain, and, self-centeredly, coming blame, haunts me the most. I hate to think of her in bitter loneliness, and I hate to think that, in the grave, I might be the subject of a deep resentment for leaving her so alone in the world.