I Found The One When I Thought I Was Unloveable
When I think of romance, I imagine a cemetery in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, where my mom is buried. My dad is standing at her grave. As are two of my ex-boyfriends, dozens of her best friends, and many of my own as well.
I’m not a goth, nor am I an exhibitionist. I’m way too uncool for either of those lifestyles. But to me that cemetery says love, and even hope, because it’s where I realized the guy I was casually seeing might actually become the guy I’d marry.
It happened in October 2007 at my mom’s unveiling. That’s the Jewish ceremony during which the grave marker is uncovered about a year after a death. It marks the end of the intense mourning period, after which grief supposedly moves into a slightly less painful phase. (The operative word in my case, a year after my one mother, my very best friend, was killed in a car accident? “Supposedly.”)
The service was beautiful. I’d worked hard to plan it, and it was a productive way to channel my why-am-I-still-so- messed-up? energy. I’d invited people I loved. But I hadn’t imagined Justin would be there until he showed up.
We’d only been seeing each other for two months, after meeting at a benefit in June. We were both standing at a silent auction table filled with such coveted items as a celebrity-signed white electric guitar and a gift certificate for storing umbilical-cord blood. He asked me about my life while looking directly into my eyes. He made me laugh. And he didn’t slowly back away with you-cray! eyes when my eating-messy-appetizers-while-standing skills more resembled a toddler’s than an adult’s.
“I’m damaged goods,” I told him that summer. I braced myself for rejection, but he didn’t flinch.
“Well . . . I just want to be around you,” he said. “Is that OK?”
Weirdly, given my fear that he’d ditch me, I wasn’t sure that it was. I’d been so unsure, in fact, that on our eventual first date, a month after meeting, I buffered myself with a group of 20 friends to serve as chaperones for the Brooklyn Cyclones game on Coney Island. And for the rest of the summer, I went out with him only on Wednesday nights. I was terrified to have anything to do with him. The way he embraced my sadness was a stark contrast to the men I’d been frantically dating in the months after my mother’s death. Those swings-and-a-miss seemed part of a simple equation: woman in deep grief searching for loving comfort + men who didn’t sign up for that = nobody wins. I’d spent months feeling like a taxi that nobody wanted to hail.
Sam was a prime example. We met through a friend and went out on fun dates mercifully containing zero deep conversation. Over a casual dinner weeks later, he asked where my parents lived. I felt queasy. It was the first time I had to tell someone new what had happened. I grabbed a French fry and matter-of-factly stated the truth, that Mom had just died, and I was still very much grieving. Within minutes Sam had ushered me into a taxi, mumbling something about an earnings call in the morning, slammed the door, and actually double-tapped the window to signal the driver to hit the gas and take me far, far away. It was only after I got home that the sting of what had occurred sank in. I felt like a grief hooker doing the walk of shame. And I didn’t hear from Sam again. Or a string of others after him to whom I dared open up about my loss.
Death is the ultimate breakup. And like a breakup, but to the nth degree, its reverberations can either emotionally slam you shut or crack you open in unimaginable ways. It’s often both, at varying times. In the years since my parents died, I let fewer people in and ditch the bad seeds. Hard as it may be, I also now try my best to prioritize meaningful relationships with real friends over non-urgent work commitments. As the ultimate Dad-ism often reminds me, “No one ever said on their deathbed they wished they’d spent more time at the office.”
And there are real friends. My lonely, dark days were buffered by truly unexpected and intimate encounters. Like the one with my old college friend Brett, who called in response to a bleak voice mail I’d left him one December evening, three months after my mom died. “Rosenbeeeerg! Meet me at 70th and Broadway in fifteen minutes!” he boomed into the phone. I wanted to go home and drink myself into oblivion, or, frankly, worse. But I forced myself through the snowfall to meet him. When I did, he was bear-hugging an enormous Christmas tree and wearing a huge smile. “I got something that we’re gonna work on all night together! Yeah! Oh, and can I borrow 20 bucks?” And so, two Jews indeed spent all night decorating a 10-foot Christmas tree in an apartment with nine-foot-high ceilings. He didn’t let me out of his sight. It was imperfect and ludicrous, and also one of the most loving gestures I’ve experienced - one that inspired me henceforth to provide equally absurd activities to friends going through something awful.
But most of all, above the Christmas trees and the boozy brunches that dear friends have taken me to time and again, there is Justin. On the day of the unveiling a man I barely knew witnessed my graveside tears and took it in stride, chatted with people who made a sport out of speculating about the role he might play in my life, and ran out to grab Wawa turkey hoagies for dinner. That day, I had to choose between safely avoiding another burn or opening up to this quiet introvert who’d proved he’d show up, no matter what, and try to do the same for him in spite of it all. So, very nervously, I chose the latter.
Our relationship isn’t easy. I mean, marriage generally isn’t easy, but that’s a whole other ball of wax. I mean the burden he has taken on of loving someone with a permanent hole in her heart, and my burden of being the one with the hole. It will never be OK that he didn’t get to meet my mother, or that the only version of my father he knew was the one who, suffering the loss of the great love of his life, could be downright emotionally unbearable. But Justin was the one who got into the deep muck with me, willing to wade through this mess together and fully engage in a marriage that has four people in it, two of them ghosts.
*Names have been changed in this piece (except for Justin’s). Not that they deserved it!
Rebecca Soffer is cofounder of Modern Loss and coauthor of the book MODERN LOSS: CANDID CONVERSATION ABOUT GRIEF. BEGINNERS WELCOME. She is a former producer for The Colbert Report and lives in New York City.
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