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So yes, I was partially trying to respect his privacy, but I was mostly trying to protect myself. From the judgment of others, which was primarily just a projection of my own self-judgment. There was a version of me that thought loving another person would somehow diminish the love I still felt for Aaron.
A version of me that thought that if I was happy, I must not be sad anymore, and if I wasn’t sad anymore, then I guess I didn’t love Aaron as much as I said I did. Or maybe that my new happiness was ill-gotten, a well-made fake, something I swiped off the back of a truck when nobody was looking.
But it is incredibly difficult to live with complicated. It is even more difficult for other people to deal with complicated.
But that’s oversimplifying the narrative. I couldn’t talk about my happiness without touching the uncomfortable truth that everything I have now is built on everything I lost.
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.
I wasn’t a normal person. I was a person who had seen beyond the veil, who had watched a young and vibrant person fade into what comes next. I didn’t know what I was supposed to make of this new life, but I knew what I wasn’t supposed to do, and knowing what not to do is a fine place to start. If you read the fine print, you will find that life is subject to change without notice.
The acknowledgment that when bad things happen they can just keep happening holds a lot of power. It can shut you down or open you up. Nobody would blame you for shutting yourself around your hurt, your loss. Nobody would blame you for making you or your life smaller, for rolling up like a threatened armadillo, which is my default reflex. A reflex, though, is not a choice.
But the flip side of tragedy can be happiness. And that comes in waves, too. Thank God.
How could they not see your suffering, just because you carefully concealed it under Instagram filters and quality lipsticks?
a few blessed moments alone in your car before you walk into your house and whatever comes next, and an old Cher song will come on the radio. It’s a dance tune, but when she asks if you believe in life after love? And suggests that inside her, something is saying she isn’t strong enough? You relate. Strongly. Most likely,
the woman behind you at Target will be chewing her gum too loud while her husband loudly espouses his questionable political beliefs. In any of these instances, you will leave your body, hovering above yourself while you breathe enough fire to burn any remaining bridges to sanity you may have. When you
It’s the unmistakable knowledge that everything is as broken as you thought it was. Especially you.
to tally up the score and gave me the results. I got an A! And a D! Anxiety and Depression. Good job, me! I HADN’T SEEN A DOCTOR since my miscarriage. There may
and shaken hands when she asked if we’d met before. If you grew up in Minneapolis, there is a strong chance that we have met before, and this doctor and I were around the
heart and my breathing. She peeked into my ears. She made eye contact with me. Widowhood is lonely, and I was vibrating with the excitement of being touched by an adult human being. The doctor asked me about my child, and his father, and when I said, “he died of brain cancer six months ago,” she stopped. That was
getting a tattoo removed. Those things counted, right? She reached into her desk drawer and removed what looked like a worksheet. “Okay, I’m just going to ask you a few questions . . .” MY FRIEND TYLER HAS ALWAYS given me the advice I don’t want to hear. Tyler and I met at a show in Brooklyn in 2006, where I was seeing a band he managed. We spent the entire night talking, giving each other crap, and deciding that we were going to be friends
to date themselves. Ten years later, it looks like we were right. Our friendship has lasted longer than a lot of marriages, even though our relationship has been entirely long distance. Tyler has always lived in Los Angeles, and I now live in Minneapolis. We have spent maybe three full days together over the course of a decade, but we’ve exchanged countless emails, chats, and text messages about everything from dating to daddy
issues. Tyler can be brash and abrasive, but is also deeply introspective, empathic, and
Your dad died. You lost a pregnancy. Quit being a fucking idiot.” With that, the phone call was over. Tyler was the first person
calling Tyler. “I’m in therapy,” I told him. “You were right.” “No shit I was right!” he barked into the phone. I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror: puffy-faced, red-eyed, greasy-haired. I looked like I felt: like total hell, and the best I’d been in months. Chapter Three Don’t Should
“You tell her this: don’t should yourself. And don’t let anyone should on you, either.”
I have should all over people my entire life, but especially on myself. My obsession with my shoulds had me living my life
Should offers you a direction to take and eliminates the stress of having to make any decisions yourself. But that clear direction has a price: it eliminates possibility and wonder from your life. There is no room for want or drive or your own humanity when should arrives, because should already has a plan.
“You should refrain from making any decisions for at least a year,” said people who didn’t realize that not making any decisions is a decision and impossible when you’re the only parent to a small child relying on you to make decisions like where he’ll go to preschool, or where you’ll live together.
Kids will not pause for grief, even if you ask them nicely.
It was the set for our major life scenes, and my brain would revisit them without my consent. Often and painfully.
Read through the most mundane of Aaron’s emails, just trying to soak up any scraps of himself he had left behind.
Their lives were unfolding in the way they had expected, and mine had not.
These shoulds that were so kindly offered to me assumed that chaos can be managed, that every problem has an answer, that tragedy can be managed if you just follow The Plan of the Should.
I’d still have the same gaping hole in the middle of my soul. Aaron would still be dead. I would still have to live my life without him. That meant that every piece of advice, every should, was worthless. Because of all the people offering me some navigational assistance,
none of them could actually do these things for me. The only person responsible for my life—the only person who could and would live it—was me. No matter what kind of Steering Committee formed around me, I had to do the work. Personal responsibility is such a bummer.
I get the sense that they are disappointed in the visit. That I am neither sad enough nor happy enough. I do not meet their expectations. I want desperately to please everyone, to show them whatever version of me they are seeking. Which Nora would you like to see today? Sad Nora? Inspirational Nora? Numb Nora?
Somewhere between our youngest years and our oldest years we learn to hide behind Shoulds and Woulds and Coulds, instead of feeling and facing what Is.
am happy. And I’m really, really fucking sad. I don’t need to worry about anyone else shoulding on me. I’m shoulding all over myself.
All of these people had an out—a potential break from the tyranny of childrearing, somewhere on the horizon. Truly, truly single parents do not. There is no partner returning on a set day or time, nobody to text when your child is driving you bonkers or reaches a milestone. It is just you.
The only thing I know is my own experience, and part of every lived experience is a natural amount of judgment and envy, two feelings that are amplified by the difficulties of motherhood.
We all want to know that we are doing a good enough job for the small human beings that have been placed in our care, and we are all sure that someone else has it better or is doing a better job.
I was alone, but I hadn’t always been alone. For that reason, single parenthood felt like a badge I wasn’t qualified to wear. Solo Parent, which seemed snappier, seemed to have been claimed by those temporarily abandoned by business travel. What was I, besides a sweaty mother with bad puke breath, laying on her son’s bedroom floor, weeping for the man we’d both lost?
do so while wearing rubber surgical gloves. She changes her own oil. When something is broken,
I was worried about everything as a widowed mom, because I had no one to discuss anything with. I had no one to tell me I was overreacting, overthinking, no one to do the parts I couldn’t handle.
to throw or catch a ball . . . how am I supposed to teach him things I don’t give a crap about? Is he going to be the weird kid in school who lives with his weird mom who never taught him how to throw a ball? I once had a friend tell me that just the act of buying a parenting book proves that you are a good
She was probably just trying to make me feel better, but I hold on to that thought during the first months of widowed parenthood, when everything is harder than it should be, and all my parenting books sit unopened on my bedside table.
steering handle sprouting up from the back. The handle lets a parent steer their kid along, without having to hunch over and push them like a stalled car. It was genius, except that it arrived at my door unassembled. The toolbox was in the garage, and I was aware, suddenly, that Aaron had been the last person to touch this box, and everything inside it. Aaron would know how to assemble this tricycle without the instructions, but I need to read them several
it will be, and when it’s finished, I call Ralph into the
“I. CAN. DO IT!” Well, then. That makes one of us. Solo parent, single parent, widowed parent. However it is you’re doing this parenting thing . . . you’re doing it.
at thirty-one. And while my heart had withered and died alongside my husband Aaron, my body remained alive and that
could I be feeling this? But aside from anger, the only thing I could feel was palpable desire. That real deep and
Feeling desire was at least feeling something, and I wanted to feel. Specifically, I wanted to feel some hands on me that didn’t belong to my toddler son. But, like, how? Earlier in my life, this had not been
What I wanted and couldn’t find in my twenties—to be paired off—was now what everyone wanted, or already had. I’d somehow passed beyond the age or lifestyle for a casual sexual encounter, which left dating as the only option. This was . . . not ideal. I didn’t want to date. I didn’t want to have dinner
show, there he was dressed in a white undershirt, the only man there taller than my six feet. “Nice job,” I said, “we should make out sometime.” He looked at me with shock and then said, “Yes, we should!” My sister took it from there, like any wingwoman would. “She’s serious,” she told him after I left,
