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In certain widow circles, they call falling in love again your Chapter 2. It’s not a whole new life, or a whole new story; it’s the continuation of something else. But death is not the only time that we start over. Life is flexible and has long legs and a million different ways to kick you right in the chops. We lose the ones we love, but we also lose friends, jobs, and our sense of self. And then, we get to assemble something new from whatever is left behind.
The night they first met, Faye’s date asked about her first husband. He asked about her experience as a widow. About what her first marriage was like. Why, he wondered, would she think he’d be deterred by her loss? Doesn’t everyone experience loss? Why would it scare him that she’d been loved, that she’d had a healthy relationship? Shouldn’t everyone have that in life? Why would we categorize our universal human experiences of loss, love, and grief as something negative?
I wish I could tell my teenage self that loving once makes you better at loving, and better at being loved. That whatever happens with each love, you can carry it all proudly.
“The problem with people,” he said, a vast generalization not targeted to my age group, which may have been why I kept listening, “is that they think there’s a right time for things. They think the world gives a shit about your timing.”
Here is what my dad was right about: there is not a right time for everything, or anything really. I know that because I have lived the reality, and have seen others live the same way. Here is what my dad didn’t say: that it’s easy to accept that notion when you’re a good, safe distance from the difficult experience you’re living through. It’s easy to say “everything happens for a reason” when you’ve already found your reason. It’s easy to say that timing is irrelevant when you’re looking back at the hardest things in your life. It’s a lot damn harder when you’re in the thick of it, when you
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It’s hard to sit with someone’s pain and allow it to make you uncomfortable. It’s much easier to try to fill that hole in the conversation with small talk, or hand the person a tissue instead of offering them your shoulder. It’s much easier to implore them to see the bright side than to be in the darkness with them.
Love is in these little things, in small acts of kindness, in the simple consideration of another person. Aaron was always considering me, keeping me top of mind. Our big love grew from a million tiny considerations of one another: How he slept with a hand on me, because he was too claustrophobic for my brand of snuggling. How he laid in bed with me until I fell asleep—even when he wasn’t tired—because he knew I couldn’t fall asleep without him. How we started and ended any day apart with a phone call.
Love is universally regarded as the highest thing that we can strive for, as something not only worth pursuing, but worth fighting for, worth dying for if you’re into that.
I knew the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and could fake my way through the Apostle’s Creed, but the moment I stepped into church, my brain took a short vacation and my body took over. Sit. Stand. Sit. Stand. Sit. St-shit . . . no. Kneel? If you keep your eyes open and move your mouth enough, nobody will know that you have no idea what’s going on.
Catholicism, am i right?
In second grade, all the children had their first communion, dressing up like tiny brides and grooms for their first taste of the body and blood of Christ. Shortly after, they’d have their first confessions, sliding into a dark booth to recite their childish sins to a man who could offer them a chore list of prayers meant to earn the forgiveness of God. And in high school, they’d been confirmed into the faith, which is basically signing a contract that says, “Yeah, I’ve looked over the purchase agreement, and this all looks great to me. Sign me up for a lifetime of Catholicism.”
Sometimes, she explained, she pictured God as an ocean. Standing on the edge, she could throw in her worries, and watch them be swept out to sea. I liked that.
It’s that simple, and it’s that hard. God is people. God is the best of them, and the worst of them. And the path to God does not start in a Church. It doesn’t even need to wind through one. You have a direct line to God, and you don’t need to make a Sunday appointment to see Her. God is here, whether you like her or not. Whether you need her or not. Whether or not you believe in her. That there is no magic spell to invoke, no special code to learn, no door that must be opened to you. You are the code and the secret and the door. You are God. Don’t get a big head about it, though.
“How are you?” is not just a question we lob at one another as small talk, it’s a question that is asked more pointedly when your life is in turmoil.
You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it
get banged up and busted if it needs to. That’s what your heart is there for.
Parenting is work, and so is love. I used to think of that as a negative aspect of love, but it’s anything but negative. Love is work. It’s work that is worth doing. Telling our kids that love is easy and effortless is a disservice to them. Because love challenges us and stretches us. It will help us grow, and if you remember being an adolescent, you know that it hurts to grow.
Ernest Hemingway wrote “the world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are stronger in the broken places.”
Well, you do know what my life is like, because I tell you about it all the time, but acknowledging your own privilege is not saying that your life isn’t hard, or your problems aren’t real. It is and they are. Acknowledging your privilege is just like me noticing brain cancer. It’s opening yourself and your awareness up to the experiences of others, experiences that have always been there, but that you didn’t notice. To things that may not negatively affect you directly, but that you can and should still care about.
There are worse things in life than not being liked, or trying something and failing, and one of them is complacency. A world where we receive zero criticism is a world where we are not contributing, where we are living at the very baseline of our abilities. It is a world where I am not doing the work that fuels me. It is a world where I am smaller for the comfort of others, and for my own safety.
