Fitness icon and actress Suzanne Somers recently died after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 76 and died one day before her 77th birthday. Her husband of 46 years, Alan Hamel, was by her side and gave her a love poem he’d written in honor of her birthday shortly before she died.
He gave it to her a day early, and the poem has since been made public. Shared with People Magazine in its entirety, Hamel started the poem, “Love: I use it every day, sometimes several times a day. I use it at the end of emails to my loving family. I even use it in emails to close friends. I use it when I’m leaving the house. There’s love, then love you, and I love you!! Therein lies some of the different ways we use love. Sometimes, I feel obliged to use love, responding to someone who signed love in their email, when I’m uncomfortable using love, but I use it anyway.”
Hamel continued, “I also use love to describe a great meal. I use it to express how I feel about a show on Netflix. I often use love to refer to my home, my cat Gloria, the things Gloria does, to the taste of a cantaloupe I grew in my garden. I love the taste of a freshly harvested organic royal jumbo Medjool date. I love biting a fig off the tree. I love watching two giant blackbirds who live nearby swooping by my window in a power drive. My daily life encompasses things and people I love and things and people I am indifferent to. I could go on ad infinitum, but you get it. What brand of love do I feel for my wife, Suzanne? Can I find it in any of the above? A resounding no!!!! There is no version of the word that is applicable to Suzanne, and I even use the word applicable advisedly.”
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The poem continues, “The closest version in words isn’t even close. It’s not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. Unconditional love does not do it. ‘I’ll take a bullet for you’ doesn’t do it. I weep when I think about my feelings for you. Feelings, that’s getting close, but not all the way.” Hamel described their relationship, which spanned over several decades, writing, “55 years together, 46 married and not even one hour apart for 42 of those years. Even that doesn’t do it. Even going to bed at 6 o’clock and holding hands while we sleep doesn’t do it. Staring at your beautiful face while you sleep doesn’t do it.”
The poem concluded with, “I’m back to feelings. There are no words. There are no actions. No promises. No declarations. Even the green-shaded scholars of the Oxford University Press have spent 150 years and still have failed to come up with that one word. So I will call it ‘us,’ uniquely, magically, indescribably wonderful ‘us.’” A representative for Somers told People that while Hamel wrote the poem for her birthday, he “gave it to her a day early and she read the poem and went to bed and later died peacefully in her sleep.”
Throughout their lengthy marriage, Somers and Hamel have been open about their deep feelings for each other. Earlier this year, she took to Instagram to share an old photo with him and a newer one, adding the caption, “Still smiling 55 years later.” In 2021, she spoke on Heather Dubrow’s podcast, gushing, “God, our relationship has always been amazing. But now that our kids are raised, and it’s just me and Al, and we paid for the tuition, we paid for the weddings and helped them get their start – now it’s just us. Man, are we having fun.”
She said later in the conversation, “This is a powerful chapter. This is the one where you are in love all the time. That’s what I feel. I’m in love all the time.”