No Happy Endings

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by Nora McInerny


  Reminders of Aaron kept showing up, little signs that he was still with me, still looking out for me. Obscure songs from our courtship played on the radio when I started my car. I would always happen to look at the clock at either 8:21—his birth date, August 21—or at 11:25—his death date. A cardinal started sitting outside my bedroom window. Look, it doesn’t sound like much, but trust me, this was all Aaron. 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 part of my relationship with Aaron. When we met in 2010, Aaron already believed her to be the pop icon she would eventually become. He was the only adult man I knew who had an opinion on Taylor Swift. And his opinion was that he loved her deeply, and someday the world would, too. Her Red album was the soundtrack to his first brain surgery and our first year of marriage, a physical CD we purchased at Target just to make sure we got the bonus tracks. I 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.

  My big sister Meghan was the only person I could 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? No. And No. These were tickets from someone else. From my affair. He knew I was going with my sister, he said, but maybe he could go, too? Or my sister could bring her husband, and we could all go together? No. And No. AND NO!!!

  All of the illusions I’d let myself believe in dissolved in an instant. The desire was gone, and the rage was back. The spell was broken, and so was everything else. The small space I’d made for this man in my heart collapsed. He was done. We were done. No. 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.

  I was not kind and I was not gracious. I was angry. I was angry that I had tricked myself into believing that there was a substitute for grief, and that it was this . . . mess. I was not a carefree twenty-something. I was a deeply wounded thirty-something mother. He was engaged.

  I deleted his number, but he called me anyway. He called me over and over and over, and I finally answered. He wanted me to know it was over. I was relieved—he got it—our fling, our tidy little entanglement that was just about sex, was over. But I’d misunderstood. He didn’t mean we were over—he meant his engagement was over.

  “Why did you do this?!” I shouted, as quietly as I could without waking my child, who was sleeping next to me in bed.

  He had thrown away that perfectly planned-out life for a person he’d known for a few weeks, someone so broken she hadn’t even really started grieving for the life she’d lost yet. He loved me. And he would wait for me. He had made a huge mistake. But he didn’t see it this way. Even when his parents told his brother, who called him, panicked, urging him to get it together, to tell their parents he had not been in his right mind when he called to tell them he was throwing away the future they’d planned for him to take a chance on a recently widowed white lady with a toddler, he didn’t think he was making a mistake. Not even when he found out 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 the gravity of what he had done as he heard the words out loud. He thought . . . he thought things were different from what we agreed they were. He wanted me to be happy about his choice, he had expected me to show up on his doorstep and replace the fiancée I’d helped him betray, to combine my chaotic world with his orderly one and create something and new. He’d wait, he said. Ten years? Fifteen? As long as it took.

  There was no point in waiting for me. It really wasn’t him; it 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.

  His carefully curated life was now as broken as mine, and why? Because when my mouth said “don’t love me” my actions had screamed “love me love me love me!” I texted him in the middle of the day, just to see how he was doing. I held his hand when he drove. I replied to his “good morning” texts. And I knew that I shouldn’t, I knew that my “don’t love me” disclaimer didn’t speak louder than any of those actions. 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?

  Well! Outside of my world of make-believe, there was a humiliated woman on the other side of the world wondering how and why her carefully planned life had fallen apart. There were two sets of parents exploding with shame and anger. And there was a sweet, kind man on the other side of my telephone who thought this phone call was going to go very, very differently. I hung up the phone and cried as quietly as I could. Because my broken heart had broken another heart, and a few more around that one. If a widow kisses an engaged man in Minnesota, how many hearts will shatter in Chennai, India?*

  My sister insists that I am overblowing my role in the explosion of this man’s life. She assures me that he was never that interested in an arranged marriage, that he always had reservations, and that I was just a very convenient, very beautiful (my words, not hers) escape hatch from that reality.

  We were both playing make-believe, I guess. We were both lost and scared, looking for someone to cling to. It feels good to have that absolution, even secondhand. 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 strangers over a meal or an activity, searching for common emotional and/or physical ground, hoping to find a needle of commitment in a haystack of hookups. My recent foray into homewrecking aside, I can admit that while I had certainly participated in the dating game before my marriage to Aaron, I had never been great at dating. I’d never be called up to an All-Star team. I was mostly a benchwarmer, probably because when 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, it broke me. This sounds dramatic, and it should, because I was sixteen years old.

  It’s over.

  I go back and forth between wondering what I ever saw in him, and wondering if anyone will ever see anything in me.

  I’d fallen in love with this boy the first day of high school. Which also sounds dramatic, but when you are fifteen and Eros hits you with a bolt of lightning during freshman orientation, you’re power
less over your destiny. We dated for a year, and it was emotionally turbulent because I was emotionally 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. It feels perfectly logical to kiss a boy on your parents’ front steps and think, “I am done looking, I have kissed the last mouth I will ever kiss. I am going to marry this mouth and the boy it’s attached to.” It feels absolutely right to imagine what your kids will look like, and dream of a far-off day, when you’re both old—twenty-two or twenty-three, maybe—and you can get married and have all the sex you want and really start your lives, you know? That plan felt perfectly logical—to me, at least. And I have the diary entries to prove it.

  This boyfriend and I went to a teeny tiny high school together and if he didn’t love me anymore, would anyone else love me, ever? Surely, now that I was marked as having belonged to him for an entire academic year, nobody else could ever love me. It was against the laws of the social contract, the laws of physics, probably even the legal laws. Once you’ve been loved by one person, how can another person in such close proximity feel the same way about you?

  These are real thoughts and real concerns that were in my soft little head at the time, and when I revealed them to one of my closest friends, while we were in my room applying one of our thirty-seven layers of makeup before going to this ex-boyfriend’s football game, she made eye contact with me in the mirror and looked at me like I’d just drop-kicked a baby seal. “NORA,” Erin said between lip gloss applications, “I never want to hear you say that AGAIN.” Erin had just broken up with her first boyfriend, who responded to this news by spending every bus ride to school sitting directly in front of us, blasting the Goo Goo Dolls and wiping tears 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 at seventeen that love was made for beauty queens. Erin was the Prom Queen. She was undeniably beautiful, hilarious, and didn’t give a crap what anyone thought of her. Of course someone would love her again. Of course she hadn’t squandered her only chance at love by age sixteen. But I knew, on some level, that I had.

  I didn’t say it again, but I definitely thought it again. And again. And again. Well into my twenties, with every relationship that dissolved, I was sure that my capacity for love, and being loved, was somehow diminishing. It felt like romantic love was a finite resource, and that my capacity for having it in my life was sliding through my fingers with every unreturned text message, every second date that didn’t materialize. The only measure for a successful relationship was that it lasted forever, so what did that make every relationship that had an expiration date? A big failure. A waste of time. A reassurance that I was for sure as unlovable as I thought I was at age sixteen.

  Not only was my future disappearing, but my past was adding up. Each doomed relationship had the potential to become baggage, which as I understood it was extremely undesirable. To 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. Any past experiences are just that—in the past. You want to be a person with no past, the human equivalent of a goldfish, completely unencumbered by anything you’d ever seen and experienced, all of your history evaporating from your little goldfish brain, placing you blessedly and perpetually in the present moment.

  Everyone puts their best foot forward in a dating profile, putting time into the selection of photos and the self-descriptions. You’ve got just a few sentences to snag the potential Love of Your Life while they swipe through a seemingly endless catalog of available humans. As my friend Faye designed her dating profile, she made a conscious decision to include her relationship status, which doesn’t sound like anything daring, except that her relationship status was “Widow.” She worried about that one single word and the effect it might have on potential mates. 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 Faye and her husband.

  That’s a fair concern to have, because it’s a lot to live through when it happens to you. I shared the same concerns as Faye when I started dating. My husband had not died suddenly. Aaron had been treated for brain cancer for three years before he died, and I knew from revealing that information even in platonic situations that it had 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, fancy free, and devoid of any traces of trauma, grief, or even basic human emotions. Plenty of my widow friends have left that word off their dating profiles, have struggled with when and how to “reveal” this truth to a potential suitor. Plenty of my not-widowed friends have their own things that they’re sure would be “too much” for someone to possibly opt in to loving them. None of those things involve incinerating somebody you once shared a bed with.

  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?

  Faye married this guy, because duh.

  Unless you marry the person you met at age fifteen at high school orientation when you were shiny and new, everyone you meet will come to you in some other-than-new state: pre-owned, slightly used, refurbished. No matter how slick and shiny we look on the outside, we’ve all got some miles on us. And that’s not a bad thing. 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 kind who tell you the truth when you ask how they are, who don’t even think about lying and telling you that everything is fine. It’s not like I was trolling Craigslist for Damaged Humans, but something inside me started to pull me toward people who had also experienced hard things. I 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 been to the dark places, who had walked through the fire. 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 no
t a burden to me, and will not be a burden to the person who loves me next. 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 from. This is what I know, what I’ve learned from life. 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.

  “WIDOWED MOM SEEKS HUMAN MALE WHO HAS BEEN THROUGH SOME SHIT”

  What kind of shit? I don’t know! You tell me. 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).

  About me: I’m very tall, very widowed. A mom to a toddler boy who has an Oedipal complex and thinks he’s going to marry me (just want you to be aware of the competition you’re up against). I’m opinionated, obstinate, and obsessive. I am quick to anger, quick to cry, quick-witted and a slow runner. A very slow runner. I don’t know if you can really call it running, really. I don’t know what I want. Some heavy making out? Someone to text me for no reason? A person who is absolutely, positively in love with me? It varies, day by day. I know that I want you to play with my hair while we lay on the couch and listen to records. I want you to hold my hand while we’re driving and take out the trash before you’re ever asked. I want you to want me, but not need me. To be there for me without my asking, and to go away without being told. I want you to keep me company and keep your promises.

 

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