The Ultimate Importance of Love: Katharine & Jack -- A GREAT LOVE

Katharine & Jack, Los Angeles, California 1991-1992

Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 1993-1996

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Welcome Readers Worldwide to

Jack's Blog on Pairing Relationships

This blog will be VERY PERSONAL and include EXPLICIT WRITING ON SEX, LOVE & DEATH TOPICS.

So be warned ahead. Do not read if you are conformally uncourageous.

The passage below is from my notebook (I have written many including diaries off and on for many years) dated around June or July 1989 just a few months after I met the Life of my Love and the Love of my Life, my Other Half, SoulMate, Katharine in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

This was just a few months after my second wife, Elaine, from Canada, died from cancer her hand in mine in a hospital after I was her sole carer and confidant for the 9 months over which her very difficult and despairing dying took place.

Quick explanation on above. I had separated from Elaine around 1984 when she and I and our two children (daughter 20, son 16—neither my biological children but legally adopted) were living together in Surfers Paradise an hour’s drive south of Brisbane. I was living on my own near her and the kids who would come to stay overnight with me from time to time.

Around August 1989 I got a call from Elaine tearfully telling me her cancer was back and would I please come to be with her. I immediately went to her and pledged my love as her husband to take care of her as much as she wished and would allow considering her sometimes palpable anger to the point of hatred toward me.

We moved to a beautiful house with a serene view on the slope of the mountains of Lower Beechmont just north of Nerang inland of Surfers Paradise located on the beach. Elaine wanted a “pure and natural” setting in which to heal herself of the reappearing cancer which she felt could be done using spirituality and naturopathic medicine and treatments. I will not go into this topic anymore here for now.

Fast forward (still painfully) to Elaine’s death her hand in mine in a Surfer’s Paradise hospital April 1989. I had already been seeking another woman to live with for a year or more before her cancer reappeared and she had asked me to come live with her. After her death I joined the best, professional relationship agency money could buy in Australia at that time. It was expensive but proved more than worth it. This agency had a very thorough screening and assessment process that resulted in a 10 page plus profile of members that gave a very detailed picture of the person. I had read through dozens of women’s profiles and had met face-to-face with five I considered worth meeting after reading. But none had even clicked to the point of wanting to meet them again. Then Mallarme’s throw of the dice gave me Katharine.

When I read her profile the world STOPPED as the heroine, Roseanna, of a favorite romantic comedy of mine For Roseanna put it to describe when she first met her husband to be Marcello. I remember reading Katharine’s words that then and there branded themselves into this brain as my mind for the rest of my time right up to now when I still read them by braille.

The agency set up a meeting for us in the downtown Brisbane Hilton hotel lobby. I suppose I felt those butterflies of the possibility that she would actually not be those words she wrote that I valued so highly as a possible person. We had talked briefly on the phone before we met. I felt comfortable—in fact, at home—with her voice as if I had heard it often before. It fit her words—career manicured nails with clear polish in an expensive tailored, tight but expansively soft brown leather glove—I had read. However, as my usual, I was ready to be disappointed.

We had both told each other the kind and color of clothing we would be wearing to identify each other. My eyes found hers as hers mine immediately as I walked into the lobby where she stood serenely waiting within its trademark soaring interior light well. Her sunshine overwhelmed that coming from above. Tractor beam lock on. Goodbye, fare thee well, and I was gone into HER where I still am with this breath and its next until my death do us part.

Here is a passage from the earliest writing I did on her, circa June or July 1989 after our Hyatt Miracle. I was living alone at the time of the writing. Katharine was living and working full time in Brisbane at the time and visiting me on weekends. The words begin with a recording of a dinner at our favorite restaurant, Lucky’s, run by a prototypical Italian proud owner whose hug and smile encompassed the entire dining room without trying. The words were being written while reading a book—doing both not unusual for me—upon the bathroom throne which I had been driven to by my (in)famously gut-busting chilli that always gave me the runs.

The first entry of the notebook is about driving my front-wheel drive Puegeot 205 GTI very fast sports car very fast up and down the very curvy Beechmont road where everyday I went between my home and the factory where I was manufacturing boutique clothing under the name of Kali Design, the company my wife was the sole and award-winning designer for until her death.

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“The precise feel of the wheel in my hands, the concentration of the curves, all of the universe wanting to go straight, the weight of it, angular momentum, energy as the resistance to the four forces, and I hold you also in my hands, your fine flesh, the breast I cup, the swell of the belly I try, the machinery of desire, the clutch of gravity, how we come together demonstrating the plasma of beginnings.”

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“How I delight when we talk together about stars, matter, quantum physics, over pumpkin-filled pasta, Lucky’s special, with that zesty cream sauce & the finger long pieces so hot when you bite into them you have to dance with them between your teeth—and sitting with Cotterill’s “No Ghost in the Machine” as I practice being a jet turbine for the 3rd time today due to my famous chilli, I think of you, the feel of our muscles acting on one another, the slide in & out, the excitement building as the body gathers its charge, your moans & rhythmic patting of my shoulder or the slap of my groin against your ass—now say it as I put the book down, I see Elaine’s face at death, the tight, clenched absolute stillness; the flesh no longer filled with her—and I am still here and Katharine—which means pure—now I have her life as she has mine from time (that one) to time (yes).”