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They were married for thirty years, before death tore them asunder, before she was widowed for the second time. She should not have been surprised, she supposed. All her life, all around her, she had noted the existence of more widows than widowers, especially among older women, among women past their childbearing years. If a woman was fortunate enough to survive childbirth – and Alyssa had survived eight birthing beds in her life – then the likelihood of that woman outliving her husband was higher than the other way around.
Though, when you were married to a man fourteen years younger than yourself, you would not think that it was irrational, or unreasonable, or greedy, or even presumptuous, to suppose that this time, you would not be the one burying the dead, the one left behind to mourn, the one doing the remembering rather than the one being remembered.
*
She was forty three when they were wed; he, nine-and-twenty. She was seventy three when he died; he, nine-and-fifty. Truth be told, thirty years of marriage with Robar was more than what Alyssa had thought likely in the beginning. Once, not long after their wedding, she had said to him, half-jesting (only half!), You’ll have me by your side for twenty five years at the most. Then you’ll have to find another woman to warm your bed, some nubile maiden half your age.
He started to frown, before smiling his mischievous smile, eyes twinkling, deciding to play along, Twenty five years? That would make me fifty four. A nubile maiden is more likely to be a third my age, not half my age.
She threw a pillow at him, playfully. Hah! I knew it! An eighteen-year-old is what you really want. All that talk about maturity, about seasoned wine, about a wise woman knowing her own heart and her own mind is just that – talk, cheap talk.
He caught the pillow deftly with one hand, stroked her hair tenderly with the other. Then, drawing her closer towards him, he declared, not in a bashful whisper but in a proud and defiant voice, I only want you.
The eighteen-year-old me? she teased.
The forty-year-old, the fifty-year-old, the-sixty-year-old, the-seventy-year-old, the eighty-year-old, the –
She planted a kiss on his lips when he got to seventy, trying to halt the recitation of numbers, of ages she was certain she would never reach.
*
Twenty five years of marriage with Robar would have taken Alyssa to sixty eight, the same age her mother had been when she died. The years of her widowhood, confided Lady Velaryon to her daughter during her final illness, had been the happiest time of her life. I was the daughter of one lord, and then I was the wife of another lord, both of whom wanted, expected and demanded that I only be seen but not heard. Finally, blessedly, I was free.
Free. Free at last. Free from the prison of marriage, from the bondage of a stifling union.
Alyssa had been infinitely more fortunate than her mother. Her second marriage had never been a prison she longed to escape from. She had loved Robar when she married him, had continued to love him throughout, and even beyond, their married life. She had chosen him, and, more importantly, had been free to choose him in a way that most women during her lifetime had not been free to choose their husbands.
The greater the love, the deeper the grief; the happier the union, the more sorrowful the parting. That was the price that had to be paid, and she had paid it, paid it ten times over. But who, after all, if they were lucky enough to have the chance to choose, would choose years and years of misery in marriage just so they would not have to be pained after the parting? Who, after all, would throw away the chance to share a life with a loved one, with the excuse that it would hurt too much if their beloved should perish before them?
After years of sorrow and tears in the past, who, after all, would give up laughter and smiles in the here and now, for fear of more sorrow and tears in the indistinct future?
*
Her grief, this time, was less complicated by guilt and doubt, by the feeling that she had not done enough, that she could have done more, so much more, and that she should have done certain things differently. With her first husband’s death, there was always the self-reproach, the second-guessing, the what-ifs and could-have-beens haunting her. If she had been more wary and more suspicious of Dowager Queen Visenya from the start … if she had not allowed Visenya near her husband at all … if she had taken Aenys to her father’s seat at Driftmark when he began ailing instead of staying in Visenya’s stronghold at Dragonstone … if, if, if, the endless ifs. Her self-reproach and second-guessing went even deeper when it came to the death of her son Viserys. I should have … I could have … I might have …
With Robar, she had done all she could, she believed. Searched and summoned countless maesters and healers from across the Seven Kingdoms and beyond, barely left his side throughout the long months of his illness, held his hand and whispered words of love and promises of reassurances in his ear as he drew his last few breaths, closed his eyes and kissed his brow as the final send-off.
This did not make her grief any easier to bear. Not at all. Not in the least. But it did mean that she was able to remember Robar in more diverse ways than one, that she was not forced to relive only his final days over and over again in her memory, as she did with Aenys and Viserys. She could also call to mind all the good times, the joy, the bliss, the shared happiness of their shared life, not just the desperate sorrow of his last days, of his passing, of its bleak and dismal aftermath.
It also meant that when she dreamed of Robar at night, reaching out for his hand, for his touch, he did not turn away from her gaze, did not try to elude her grasp, as Aenys and Viserys all too often did.
*
And yet, happiness remembered, is, of course, a mighty poor substitute for happiness actually felt, experienced, lived, in the here and now.
*
This, then, is the conundrum: if love is a prelude to grief, does that make grief an inevitable consequence of love? And would you still choose to love, if it is a matter of choosing, knowing what the unavoidable result would be, knowing the pain you would have to endure, if not now, certainly some time later, perhaps in the not-so-distant future?
But perhaps, she reflects, it is not a conundrum at all. Even knowing what she knows now, feeling what she feels now, and suffering what she suffers now, if she is given the chance to go back in time, thirty years in the past, she would have done the exact same thing, would have chosen a life with him all over again, without any regret, without a moment of hesitation.
You choose, and you live with the consequences. That is the only kind of hope she believes in.