Picking Up the Pieces As a Newly Single Mother

When my husband died four years ago, our in-house math guy did, too. On the scale of loss, this was perhaps a trivial thing. Yet even on that first afternoon, as news of his suicide spread through the family and to MIT, where Seth was a beloved robotics professor, and as bouquets of white lilies and pans of macaroni and cheese arrived on our doorstep, I remember thinking: Who will help the girls with math? It wouldn’t be me.

That summer, with my two young daughters out of school, I didn’t have to confront the math issue quite yet, which was good, since our ability to problem-solve was low: We were just three zombie girls, stumbling through each hour of every day.

After the funeral, with critical documents signed, I somehow got us on the road: We’d escape for the summer to my mother’s cottage in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, a couple of hours from our home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My parents had bought the house and an acre of land on top of a hill in 1964, the year I was born, and I’d spent every summer of my childhood there. The place was saturated in vivid memories of my own early years: my father’s arms around me, dancing to Donovan on the record player as we awaited the shower after a beach day; square-dancing Wednesday nights on the pier; and bundling up in pajamas for a night at the drive-in, a bunch of kids sprawled across pillows in the back seat of my mom’s baby blue VW Squareback.

The Cape was also where Seth and I first held hands, and where we married—at Crosby Beach on a cloudless September day. Our wedding was a dream: I was tan and pregnant with our first child and working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Twelve years after that ceremony, I was a 50-year-old widow with two kids and a part-time job in public radio.

My mother was anxiously standing at the door of the cottage when we arrived. We settled in, and I tried to establish a daily routine that would help me, and by extension the children, feel safe again. My bosses had given me the summer off. My only job was to muscle through the days.

My mother tried her best to help, cooking the girls soft-scrambled eggs and sweet potatoes for supper and taking them to the public library in the afternoons on days I couldn’t get out of bed. But helping me was nearly impossible; there was no comfort food, no comfort at all.

She gently suggested she understood what it was like for me as a single mom, since she, too, had been abandoned—by my father in the divorce—and left to raise two kids. That comparison enraged me. How could she possibly compare divorce with death? Yes, she worked hard as a high school English teacher while raising children, but she had her weekends free while my brother and I stayed with my father. And despite my parents’ chilly relationship, they could call on each other if there was an accident or emergency. I had lost that domestic luxury when Seth died: My backup plan was gone. I was the backup plan, and that idea was perhaps the most terrifying of all.

Most days I coaxed the girls to join me for a swim in the ocean’s cold water. Sometimes we took our rubber rafts and rode waves, a short-term thrill that braced us against the sickening sadness. On other days we stopped at one of the little freshwater ponds—Long Pond with its old wooden dock for diving, or Gull Pond with its narrow waterway. We’d visited these spots so many times as a family that the excursions felt almost normal, as if Seth were just away for the day, and we’d pick him up later at the Provincetown airport. Sometimes, I’d inadvertently put a fourth towel out for him on the sand, imagine I’d see him in the waves with one of the girls on his shoulders, about to take a dive.

At the bay in Truro, the low tides seemed especially low; we’d walk out for nearly a quarter mile, our bare feet stepping around horseshoe crabs and barnacled razor clams, disrupting entire neighborhoods of sea life. At sunset, we’d stare out across the water to the Provincetown monument. I thought: If Seth had seen one more of these glorious rose sunsets, if he’d watched our youngest, Jojo*, do 50 cartwheels in a row on the sand, heard Samantha* sing “Unwritten” in the outdoor shower, maybe he wouldn’t have done it. Maybe he would have reconnected to some lifeline of beauty and wonder—her voice, her muscular little body—and snap out of his descent into darkness.

But Seth was not one to reach for a lifeline—he rarely asked for help. He was private, self-contained, and felt he should deal with his own problems—the ultimate fixer. Not only did he repair broken objects, but he’d anticipate which systems might go haywire and fix those too. He configured our toaster oven to turn off automatically after 30 minutes in case we forgot about it. When our younger daughter was a toddler with eczema, Seth would warm her medicated lotion in the microwave, so it wouldn’t be cold on her skin. He’d tell our kids: “I can fix anything except a broken heart.” He seemed to believe this. Going through his office after he died, I found a small wooden box labeled: “Things to fix.” It cradled the girls’ broken necklaces and ceramic figurines and bits of long-forgotten toys.

Then, before I knew it, late August came, and the mornings turned chilly. We wore sweaters and jeans on our trips to Mac’s on the pier for lobster rolls and Portuguese kale soup. I started to think about heading home. The day before Labor Day, I packed up the Subaru with snacks and games and pillows and plastic bags full of beach shells with perfect holes for necklace chains. I was scared to go home, but my fear was grounded by annoyance and resentment. As I lugged the not-fully-zipped suitcases out of the house I let the door slam behind me, thinking: I’ll never have a man to help with the bags again. I said a curt, ungrateful goodbye to my mother; I was not yet ready to acknowledge her sadness or the anguish so many others around us also carried.

The girls in the back seat, I turned the car right, off Cranberry Hollow Road and onto Route 6. That summer, I’d resolved that my children and I could take a pass on pretty much everything: I suspended screen-time rules, tossed away bedtimes. But Samantha, a diligent student, took her summer math assignment—a packet of worksheets due at the start of sixth grade—seriously. Finishing it had become something of an obsession, and by the time we left the Cape, she’d completed 12 of the 15 pages.

In the car’s back seat, she leaned over the final problems, pencil in hand. We slid into the line of slow, heavy traffic, along with thousands of other vacationers making the exodus back to their workaday lives. I peeked into other cars, envious when I spied a pair of adults with children; I imagined them trading driving shifts, keeping each other alert with chatter about plans for the first day of school and logistics for their bustling, happy, two-parent worlds.

About 30 minutes down the road, Samantha screamed. “A spider’s on my math packet!” I caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror, shaking the pages vigorously with her left hand, opening the window with her right, waving the packet around, trying to throw the spider off. Next I spied the white sheets fluttering out the window. They floated over Route 6, descended into the traffic, only to alight again in the mild winds.

I’d already been struggling to keep my anxiety in check: All the packing, the getting-us-out, the anticipation of rebuilding a domestic life without our foundation—all this unease had been weighing on me. Samantha’s wailing crescendoed: “My math packet! My math packet! We have to stop!” Her screams punctured my built-up tension; the tricks I’d used to keep from losing it—they were gone.

“We can’t stop! We’re in the middle of the fucking highway. Look at the traffic.”

Samantha erupted into tears. “But I need it! I need my math packet!”

I let loose the kind of hollering that I know fully well is unacceptable but once unleashed, is unstoppable. “I can’t deal with this!” I yelled. “I can’t! I can’t get your math packet! You’ll have to do the work again.”

Next, I cried at my own meanness, and then Jojo started crying. “Isn’t Daddy’s death enough? Why can’t we all just get along?” she pleaded.

I pulled over onto a dirt road in Eastham and laid my head down on the steering wheel.

“Okay, we have to calm down,” I said. I looked back and saw my daughters’ tear-stained, distorted faces. They looked little again, their staccato gulps and whimpers reminding me of a fall off a swing, a scrape on a table’s sharp corner. By this time, Jojo had joined forces with her sister in begging to retrace our path.

I took a breath. “I’m going to turn around and we’ll search for the papers.”

So I circled back and headed east on Route 6, past Arnold’s mini-golf and the Elk’s Club. I felt like Seth: I mustered his resolve, and determination to fix the problem. He’d often gone searching for the lost earring or the delicate, handmade bracelet that had slipped off in the waves. Many times he’d pull out his snorkeling gear, and we’d watched him dip under the water. He always came back up. Sometimes he’d paddle around for hours, and often, miraculously, he found the lost trinket.

He’d call the girls over, shake his head, and coyly say, “Couldn’t find it.” But then he’d spin around and shake his booty, laughing, the found object jiggling on his waistband. The girls squealed at their great fortune: their dad, with his uncanny ability to turn bad situations into triumphs.

There on the road, I made a deal with the kids. “If we don’t find these pages easily, you’ll just have to let go. We’ll get home and, Samantha, you will redo the work. And if the pages are on the highway, we can’t get them. I am not going to pick up pieces of paper in oncoming traffic.” They agreed.

About a mile or two down the road, on a small patch of sandy shoulder, I saw a line of white shapes. Samantha pointed, “What’s that?” She rolled down the window and stuck her body out. I pulled over, and even before I turned off the engine, she had unbuckled her seat belt and flung her door open. There, along the side of the road, were pages of paper, lined up like little white ducks on a path. Twelve in a row. The girls lunged and dove, collecting. I joined them, and we all three skipped together, each shaking a cluster of sheets in our hands, waving them in the air. Tire marks smeared them, their edges had been torn and crumpled. But we’d found them.

Looking back, I think this was one of the first moments after Seth’s death in which I felt a little hope. We’d lost something enormous: our math person. He’d gone away, flying through the air, out of our grasp and then out of sight, inexplicably and suddenly, and we’d been left alone and helpless. But somehow that day, the three of us bound together had found something we needed: those scruffy, tire-marked pages. Maybe we’d be able to pick up the bits of our lives—our pages, our work, our stories, things dear—smooth out the crumpled sheets, clear off the dirt, and begin to reassemble what we cherished.

*Names have been changed.

Rachel Zimmerman, a former Wall Street Journal and public radio reporter, is working on a book about life after her husband’s suicide. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her daughters.