What if, like Sandra Bullock, you only got eight years with the love of your life?
I met Sandra Bullock once in March 2022, on the red carpet for the SXSW premiere of her rom-com with Channing Tatum “The Lost City.” I complimented her vibrant red-orange blazer and drawstring pants, a stylish choice warm enough to provide some relief from the unusually cool Austin night.
“I’m no dummy. I know how to cover it up,” she told me with a laugh.
She joked that Brad Pitt, who had a cameo in the film, brought "Not much” to the role. She also shared that Pitt worked one day for free, at her request, a bit of news I suspect she knew would draw readers to my story. And it did!
Sandra Bullock at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas, on March 12, 2022.
The scoop gave me relief because I had something to write about. But there’s no telling what was going through Bullock’s mind. At the time, her partner, photographer Bryan Randall, was privately fighting ALS. He died over the weekend after a three-year battle. In a statement provided to USA TODAY, Randall’s family requested “privacy to grieve and to come to terms with the impossibility of saying goodbye to Bryan."
I didn’t know Randall, and my conversation with Bullock only lasted about two minutes, but the news struck me. I’m a single 36-year-old raised on movies that pushed “and they lived happily ever after.” I ached for Bullock when news broke in 2010 that her ex-husband Jesse James cheated. But it seemed in Randall she had found a happy ending. The pair met in 2015 and made their red carpet debut at the premiere of her film “Our Brand Is Crisis” that October.
Bullock described Randall as “the love of my life” during a December 2021 episode of “Red Table Talk.” She talked of the couple raising her two adopted children and Randall’s from a previous relationship together. “It’s the best thing ever,” she said. “I don’t need a paper to be a devoted partner and devoted mother. I don’t need to be told to be ever-present in the hardest of times. I don’t need to be told to weather a storm with a good man.”
Octavia Spencer called Randall and Bullock soulmates in a touching Instagram post Tuesday. And the pair does look made for each other in a video from 2017 in which they hold each other as they dance to Ray LaMontagne’s “Shelter.”
If you believe in an afterlife, and I do, perhaps Bullock and Randall will be reunited. Maybe at “the best fishing spot in heaven,” where Bullock’s sister, pastry chef Gesine Bullock-Prado, envisions him, as described in her Instagram tribute to Randall. Bullock-Prado also praised her “amazing sister and the band of nurses she assembled who helped her look after him in their home.”
But, back to the question at hand: what would you do if you only had eight years to spend with your soulmate? Sure, some are lucky enough to get decades with their person; and some, unfortunately, get far less. No one knows how much time we have with someone, or how much time we have on Earth. But the fact is our time is limited. Knowing that, would you take that trip you’ve been putting off? Would you be slower to raise your voice and quicker to forgive? Would you look at socks your love abandoned on the floor or empty mugs absentmindedly left throughout the house and be grateful because you knew one day, quicker than you’d like, those things would be gone? Would you be sure to say “I love you” every day?
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver asked in her poem, “The Summer Day.” It’s an important question. I’d also like to know what you’ll do with your one precious love.