Sostenuto

Sostenuto. A sustained movement of sounds and tones that go on and on, slowly and gracefully. Emanating from these sounds and tones, unfathomable feelings are evoked. They drown in your gut, churning in waves of remembrance and moments passed. 

As with most love stories, I will commence at the beginning:

Chérie and I have a song. Well, actually we have two. Our first song found us when she was only a few months old.  Chérie was stricken with parvo early in her life. A nasty disease, whose survival rate is 50-50, claims most young. Odds are not good, especially not for runts. When this illness tried to take her, she was at the threshold of death. I say it not to be dramatic, but if you've ever seen a creature so weak who can't lift their head or open their eyes, who has resigned to the weight of gravity and cannot stand up, you might be able to understand what it was like to sit by her side while she clung to her life.

In those weeks when death tried to lure her, I played the same song over and over in my bedroom. It was a  melancholy song full of emotion and love, Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata: Adagio Sostenuto. For weeks as she withered, I pushed play and turned it up and poured my love into her, never taking my hands or eyes off her. I stopped going to college and flunked out of history and music nursing her. She shouldn't have survived, but she did. Her indomitable spirit surely had something to do with it. Her's was a deep-seated, incorrigible will to live.

Seventeen years later, as I close my eyes, Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata: Adagio Sostenuto still plays in the backdrop of my mind. While the adagio plays, the notes summon up all my senses as we embark on our new and final journey because it, and she, solicits and ravishes them all. She has always overpowered me, often leaving me in a heap with my heart grossly inflated, red and throbbing in a sack of skin, unable to imagine life without her. 

Sostenuto: a prolonged movement of love that goes on and on, never diminished in measure or tide.