Sad Day for Opera

The Reuters article on Beverly Sills dying today.

Not growing up an opera buff, I remember Beverly Sills as the host (nobody uses "hostess" anymore, right?) of An Evening at the Met, at least, I think that's what it was called, on PBS. On the occasions I watched it, her enthusiasm was infectious. She obviously loved her craft and loved sharing it with others.

I was surprised to read that she was, at one point, on the board of Time Warner. Time Warner! And they say sopranos are airheads!

The last paragraph is so sad. Her husband died last year, which I'm sure took a lot out of her.

It's an all-to-common thing, people dying shortly after their spouse passes away. You hear stories about it all the time. The strain of dealing with living without someone you've spent so much time with just wears the physical body down, which leads to all kinds of opportunistic maladies. My mom had a stroke five months after my dad passed away. She managed to hang on another year, but, at the end, I think she just got tired of being on this earth without dad.

In a way, it's kind of sweet. Even in this day and age, when some psychologists and sociologists proclaim that humans weren't meant to be monogamous throughout their entire lives, it seems that, in so many cases, they're wrong. Homo sapiens seems to mate, literally, for life... or tries to, as the case may be.

It gives those of us that have not found that special someone hope. I have always felt like I had a very naïve concept of love, a viewpoint I attribute to watching too many Disney movies when I was a kid. (Didn't Dean Jones always get Suzanne Pleshette in the end?) What if love is like the early Disney movies and all those learned "experts" are wrong?

I know. I'm a hopeless romantic.

Leaue, me, O loue which reachest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things.
Grow rich in that which neuer taketh rust;
Whateuer fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beames, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedomes be;
Which breakes the clowdes, and opens forth the light,
That doth both shine and giue us sight to see.
O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide
In this small course which birth drawes out to death,
And thinke how euill becommeth him to slide,
Who seeketh heau'n, and comes of heau'nly breath.
Then farewell world; thy vttermost I see:
Eternall Loue, maintaine thy life in me.
--Sonnet 150, Astrophel and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)