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“she’s coming to the after-party and you should totally make out with her.” He was perfect in every way: tall, handsome, and unavailable. He was engaged, which may make you hate me. But he hadn’t even met his fiancée, so it felt like a little bit of a gray area that maybe we could work around? Okay, look, none
beside me, and for a few gorgeous moments, I thought he was Aaron. The realization was too much, and I gathered my things in the dark, rushed to my car, and wept my apologies to my dead husband. Still, I went back to his small apartment a few nights later. His sweet smile and his kind eyes sometimes made me forget that this was just pretend, that
suitable replacement for any fiancée, for many reasons. He spoke to his family every day, sometimes while I was there, and his language was like a song.
Didn’t he know that I was a widow, and a mother? That it was unlikely that men would be lining up to take on all of my emotional excess? The idea of a completely blank page of a future didn’t seem like freedom, it seemed like a trap.
An email from Ticketmaster arrived, and for some reason I didn’t mark it as spam. It was the tickets Aaron had bought for us to Taylor Swift’s 1989 Tour, one of the last things he did on his deathbed. Let me repeat and clarify that: on his deathbed, my thirty-five-year-old husband used his mother’s American Express to purchase the first release of Taylor Swift tickets for a concert that would take place ten months after his eventual death. The tickets arrived, and they were very, very good tickets (thanks, Kimmer!). Taylor was a huge
am not embarrassed by any of this, because I think pop music is a true art form, and that the artistic merit of any song is measured by how it echoes through the experiences of your life.
imagine taking Aaron’s place at this show, and I felt Aaron’s approval when she accepted my offer. But days before the show, more tickets arrived. Had Aaron, in the end stages of brain cancer,
bought tickets twice? Twice before in our relationship we’d surprised each other with tickets to the same show . . . had I done that and forgotten? N...
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I said, this is not something that we do. This is something I did with Aaron. With my dead husband. Not with you, not with anyone else.
that the answer to the hypothetical “Will my family disown me if I back out of an arranged marriage?” was an absolutely real “YEP!” Not when the daily phone calls from home stopped. Not when he found himself alone in a foreign country, his family so deeply ashamed of his Westernization they refused to speak to him. He stuttered as he relayed all of this to me, slowly realizing
was me. He was beautiful and kind and wholehearted. I was broken and dead inside. I wasn’t worth planning a life around or throwing a life plan away for. I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going. Five minutes or five years, I wasn’t worth the wait.
Maybe a small part of me was hoping that just a few months after Aaron died, this unlikely romance would cure me. That against all odds, against all my protest, this would be real. I was playing pretend, lost in make-believe. What was the worst that could happen?
I have not spoken to him since. I have not looked at his Facebook profile or even looked through the photos of mutual friends to see if I can catch him in the background. Pinky swear, that’s how emotionally mature I am. Or that’s how avoidant I am. My sister, though, reports that he is doing well. That he bought a townhouse, and a BMW, and that he met a very nice Indian girl here in Minnesota. Maybe they’ll even get married. Chapter Six Baggage It was clear that I was not prepared for the dating process. Though not many people are truly prepared for holding themselves up to the scrutiny of
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I made it onto the court, I was bound to either get hurt or make someone hurt. Can you tell I don’t watch a lot of sports, or are these metaphors working? The first time a boy broke up with me,
turbulent and he was a sixteen-year-old boy with limited emotional capacity and I wanted to marry him and have a thousand of his babies and he said he loved me and doesn’t that mean, like, forever? Your first love feels like it is destiny.
from his eyes. In the weeks since their breakup, Erin had caught the eye of basically every other boy in our school because . . . of course she did! We were all just hormones wrapped in skin and school uniforms at that age! But it didn’t feel that way. I felt like Janis Ian, who learned the truth
have baggage means that you have had relationship experiences that you bring forward with you. You know, things that have affected you, formed you, and not for the better. You don’t want to have baggage when you go into a new relationship, you want to arrive with just the clothes on your back.
She feared that one word would disqualify her from the dating game. It might be “too much” for a man to know that she had loved someone before, had promised herself to be with him until death do they part. It might be a lot to take in that death, courtesy of a light-rail train in Minneapolis and an intersection he crossed every day, had parted Fay and her husband.
one of two effects on people: it could clam them up or open them like an automatic door. But when you see enough people recoil in horror at the facts of your life, you start to feel that the only way to be worthy of love is to be footloose,
None of those things involve incinerating somebody you once shared a bed with.
Why would we categorize our universal human experiences of loss, love, and grief as something negative?
After Aaron’s death, I found myself gravitating toward people who wore their miles proudly, who showed up with whatever they were carrying and just laid it out there. Not polite people, or perfect people. Just . . . people. The
lost my taste for fiction and devoured memoirs, soaking up the experiences of people who lived and felt deeply. I made friends with people who had gone through their own stuff and I realized that, romantically, I needed someone who had been through some shit, too.
Someone who had suffered at the hands of love, and who was willing to do it again. I am proud to be a widow. I am proud to have loved someone so much. I am proud to say I am still here, that I am getting through it. I am proud of the love I shared with Aaron, and who it made me today. If this is baggage, it’s at least the fancy Louis Vuitton stuff. But I don’t think it’s baggage. I don’t think that Aaron—that loving him, losing him—is something I’m trying to jam into the overhead compartment when it clearly needs to be checked.
Even if they’re often heavy and unwieldy, our past lives are not baggage. They are not defects; they are features. Our past experiences—especially the hard ones—help us navigate the world around us and ahead of us.
Aaron died at age thirty-five, and that will always be tragic and it will always make me sad. But our love and his death are not a burden to me, and will not ...
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Aaron’s love and Aaron’s death are my foundation. They’re my standard for love and marriage and strength and bravery. They are not a hurdle to overcome, they are the stable place I get to build fr...
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wish I could tell my teenage self that loving once makes you better at loving, and better at being loved. That whatever happens with ea...
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Tell me everything. Tell me about the worst thing that’s happened to you, the darkest place you’ve been. Tell me what happened next, how you picked up the pieces—some of them, at least; they’re not all worth keeping—and made something new. Tell me what happens next, where you’re heading, and who you want by your side. Tell me what keeps you up at night, or if you sleep like an old dog (not like a baby, you should know that babies don’t sleep that well).
Before these anniversaries show up as calendar reminders, my body remembers them. I’ll wake up stiff and aching, my body bracing itself for what happened years ago on that day. Even if my brain were wiped clean, my muscles, my organs, and especially my heart would always remember. Even if I’d been kept in a locked room without access to a calendar, I’d have known that Aaron’s deathaversary was growing near. Your mind can try its best to forget, to avoid, but the body remembers.
shell that only I could see. It was ugly, but oddly comfortable, and I had pretty much planned on spending the rest of my life in it. By early November, the dread had filled me completely, and was spilling out in very productive ways. For example, by spending the better part of a week inside, hunched over my computer, arguing with idiots on the internet. I was able to convincingly act as if this was indeed the best use of my time, and that it wasn’t just a misdirected way of working through my inner emotional
childhood, where my cousins and I would spend family gatherings around the votive tabletop candles, melting plastic forks into small sculptures, I said yes. And even though Moe has seen me
Aaron was always the life of the party, adept at navigating any social situation. I hung on to him like a barnacle. Without a very social whale to cling to, a barnacle is hard to bring to a party.
made him look like an adult toddler. I thought “Well, the party’s over. Now I have to pretend to know a new person’s name after I’m introduced to him.” I smiled like I imagined a normal person would do in a social
There were a few ways to let things out: rage (which the internet was great for), sex (which had already ruined a few lives), and laughter, which was harder to come by than even sex.
different from my other friends,” she kept insisting, “he’s a professional.” A professional what? She couldn’t say. But she knew he had a job! In an office! Downtown! And as enticing as that was, I said no, because, as I explained earlier, I was very busy playing
chair earlier in the night. When the fire was outmatched by the wind chill we moved our party of four inside, and this man and I sat next to each other on a love seat (foreshadowing!!!). His name was Matthew. His eyes were so giant and blue they looked like cartoon
old daughter. He’d been separated for five years. I was . . . fascinated. Moe and I have stories that are tragic—her husband died by suicide, mine by cancer—but divorce seemed like a whole different league of emotional suffering, and I had questions. Lots of questions. Like, “What happened?”
I also knew that he was handsome and sweet and honest and not self-conscious and that I would like to have sex with him and possibly even go on a date with him, too, but those were not search criteria I could enter into Facebook.
They also symbolize what I hope to do with the love I learned about from Aaron: give it to others, and to myself. To treat it like a renewable resource and not like Aaron had died and taken the secret recipe with him.
between places, on my way to somewhere, but not quite there yet. In this period, my entire life was in between. I was heading somewhere but wasn’t quite there yet. After Aaron died, I quit my job and decided I would do . . . something else.
Ralph and I spent the immediate months after Aaron died living out of a suitcase, flying back and forth across the country to visit friends and family. We’d travel on one-way tickets, so as not to get trapped into a particular itinerary. We’d overstay our welcome in guest rooms and guesthouses. We’d go back to Minneapolis for a few days at a time, only to check our mail and pack some new clothes. We were in between homes.
I was in between teenager and adult. This wasn’t permanent, I knew, but after four months of this return to adolescence, it was too comfortable to be comfortable. My mom and I fell into the best imitation of our typical mother-daughter pattern. If this wasn’t permanent—and it couldn’t be—then what was the plan? You can’t be in between forever.
Renting was just another form of in between, a semicolon where I needed a period. I needed Ralph to feel like we had a spot in this world that was really ours, a place to call our own. A place to come home to. I knew that what I was doing, by constantly moving, was avoiding putting roots down in the fear that they wouldn’t take hold. Or that they would, and I’d get chopped down again.
my hermit crab died of mysterious causes. I couldn’t tell you what did him (her?) in, but I can tell you that when I looked at these sleek, small condos, something inside of me said “no.” It wasn’t just the association fees—although, what the actual hell, those are like a second mortgage payment—it was the clear vision of what my life with Ralph would look like living
Four is chaos in childhood and comfort as an adult. I needed to give us what I hadn’t given to my hermit crab, may it Rest in Peace: a space big enough to grow into. A space to thrive. A space that was bigger than a condo.
a formality: a way for the bank to look me up and down and say, “Yep, we like
the first view. Ever since that pesky economic crash of 2008, banks have gotten reeeeeeeally upright
two-story with black shutters and bright boughs of flowers spilling over from the window boxes. There was a pergola in the backyard, and an actual picket fence. The house itself was surrounded by a towering hedge of lilacs, which gave the backyard
wasn’t even listed online yet. I called Dave. “I found the perfect house. Find out how much it costs and offer them a little more than that.” Dave insisted that I look inside the house before I made an offer, but I already knew. I already saw our Christmas tree in
