Thomas, that's such a good interpretation of the lives they led and how they might have viewed them. When you give up something so valuable to follow what you believe to be your duty, the life you choose can seem less real than the one that lives in your heart, especially if you have such beautiful memories to cement it.
I am reminded of a passage in a book I read last year where two people meet up after many years apart and one tells the other:
"Seeing you here is like waking from a twenty-year coma. You look around you and you find that your wife has left you, your children, whose childhood you totally missed out on, are grown men, some are married, your parents have died long ago, you have no friends, and that tiny face staring at you through goggles belongs to none other than your grandson, who's been brought along to welcome Gramps from his long sleep. Your face in the mirror is as white as Rip Van Winkle's. But here's the catch: you're still tweny years younger than those gathered around you, which is why I can be tweny-four in a second - I am twenty-four..."
He says then that he prefers to call it a parallel life because it sounds better. Jack and Ennis had to live parallel lives and in their case, they were teased occasionally along the way with little snippets of moments when they came out of their comas and back into the summer of '63.
I still haven't figured out which would be worse. To lose it all and wish for the rest of your life that you could have held onto it, but at the same time achieve some sort of closure which is in itself a form of healing? Or to be able to touch it at least now and then but thereby always have the wound exposed of knowing that that is all it can ever be? Either way, it is not at all surprising that a person would hold onto a golden memory like that as the symbol of all that the relationship meant/means to him. Because everything that comes after is really just an attempt to recapture that perfect moment in time.
