Unloved

by Katy Regnery

My therapist, Anna, told me it was like this when you lost a loved one in a violent or unexpected death: for years—or sometimes, in extreme cases, for the rest of your life—you might still keep track of the important days and milestones. It was because you never got to say goodbye or prepare yourself to say goodbye.

I long for someone. In my loneliest moments, I long for someone so fiercely, it aches. I want someone to hold me, to whisper in my ear, to braid their fingers through mine and breathe against my skin. I want to know love again. In fact, I actively yearn for it, though I can’t actually imagine accepting it.

But my father had been a nebulous figure on the fringes of my life at best. My grandfather, bigger than life, with a booming voice and the best bear hugs, had lived inside my heart.

Gardner found . . . that his four sons had established a pact that, in order for Adolf Hitler’s genes to die with them, none of them would have children.

Hitler’s nephews had tacitly agreed to kill their bloodline.

To know that my mother and grandfather share this fear makes it real to me, makes me feel sick, makes me feel like I’m living with a ticking bomb inside me.

I wish I was the sun so I could shine down on her, so I could examine every peak and valley of her face until I have it memorized and can recall it at any lonesome moment: the sad, beautiful, green-eyed girl from the forest.

I remind myself that during a human being’s lifetime, their DNA methylation, or how genes are activated, is not static. For instance, a change in DNA methylation patterns can turn on a gene that should have stayed off, and cause cancer. Should my methylation change over time, the wrong gene could be turned on, and I could become a serial killer.

“Sooner or later everyone was driven to love someone they could never have.”

As I look into her eyes, she smiles back at me, and the miracle of it is that it’s possible I might be doing the same for her. That, by sharing our pain with each other, we aren’t doubling it, but halving it.

There is such profound relief in being understood—in finally being known in the inexplicable way that can come only from empathy, from one broken person fathoming the grief of another.

But even that moment was surpassed by another—by the communion of two hearts that have broken and kept on beating. By the keen and consummate sympathy that is born only from surviving something that almost broke you and recognizing that journey back from hell in someone else’s eyes.

The minutes I’ve spent with her are the greatest gift my quiet life has ever known.

The most experienced climbers in the world have come away from Katahdin calling her a beast, and for whatever reason, that makes me proud.

She blushes, and for just a second I feel like the king of the world because my actions and my words somehow manage to touch her.

My Cassidy is a phoenix rising from that fire—the same good man he always was, without the burden of a mistaken identity, without cursed blood flowing through his veins.