Unexpected goodness is as large and overwhelming as unexpected tragedy. It feels as if all unexpected life events blow in all at once, like a summer storm that drops rocks of ice on your lawn on an eighty-degree day. That’s true of the hard things: they arrive with an exclamation mark, sudden and declarative. But the good things are different. Looking back, you always see that they took their time. A high school boyfriend of mine told me that it’s absolutely possible to be struck by lightning twice. He knew because it happened (twice!) to his uncle. It seemed impossible to me when he told me, but it doesn’t anymore. If something extraordinary happens to you, why shouldn’t it happen twice? Be just as likely to happen again? Why should I be surprised to find myself here? Why shouldn’t I be feeling this electric rush of new love? I don’t know how electricity works, and I’m thirty-five and not likely to become an electricity enthusiast at this age.
But I know that being loved really well made me more attuned to love itself. In my early twenties, I couldn’t tell the difference between love and guys who were barely interested in me. I thought love could be born out of persistence, that given the right circumstances and the right amount of weed and alcohol, I could certainly convince a guy to love me. Aaron took no convincing, no persuading.
Loving him, and being loved by him, was easy. I had the good stuff with Aaron, and I lost it. But I didn’t lose the muscle memory for it. I know what it is when I see it. I can meet a couple and quickly sense whether or not they’re built to last, which sounds extremely judgmental (and absolutely is), but is also true.
I had the good stuff, and now I have the good sense not to let it sneak by me if I find it again. It’s luck, but it’s not as random as lightning, which, it turns out, isn’t even random. It’s all about ions and electrical charges. About the reaction of energies to one another. I just told you I’m not at an age where I’m going to learn much about electricity, but I did a cursory Google and the National Severe Storms Laboratory has a very instructional page titled “Lightning 101.”
They confirmed my high school boyfriend’s observation that lightning can absolutely strike twice in the same place. Maybe just as a fluke, but perhaps, also, because there is some quality about the location that makes it more likely to be struck.
This lightning struck because I was ready for it—I was basically standing in the rain, wrapped with tinfoil, using a plugged-in hair dryer. I knew a good thing when I saw it, because I’d had a good thing before. The gift had been given.
Chapter Thirteen
Too Soon
Love is strange. You won’t find that in the Bible, but they should update 1 Corinthians to reflect that.
Love is patient
Love is kind
Love is absolutely bizarro.
I love love. But it makes no sense that we can smell someone’s terrible breath every morning and still want to spend our lives with them. It is completely bonkers that after we’ve had our heart put through a meat grinder, we just gather up the chunks and say, “Well, let’s try again!”
Love is universally regarded as the highest thing that we can strive for, as something not only worth pursuing, but worth fighting for, worth dying for if you’re into that. And the strangest thing about love is that we have opinions about love that isn’t ours. I do. You do. We all do. Because baseball is criminally boring, our national pastime is to analyze the relationships of others: celebrities, friends, absolute strangers who post annoying Instagram photos. Love is entertainment. Love is sport.
My father used to tell me that the only people who knew anything about a relationship were the two people who were in it. Anybody else’s commentary was pure speculation, baseless opinion. But I love baseless opinion! I love reading articles where a relationship expert analyzes photos of celebrity couples and deciphers their relationship via body language. I love looking at a couple’s wedding album and guessing how long it will take them to file for divorce. I am an absolute jerk!
And that’s why I didn’t want anyone to know about Matthew. Matthew is a handsome man with olive skin and giant blue eyes and dark, curly hair. He has a “strong” nose, which, because everyone secretly wants to date their dad, is always an essential for me. Even his hands are good-looking, and still, I hid him away like the hunchback of Notre Dame. I didn’t make him live in a tower, mainly because he did have children to raise and a job to go to, I just . . . didn’t really go out in public with him. Aside from Costco and the occasional movie, our relationship developed via FaceTime, text messages, and the two nights a week where he didn’t have his children and Ralph had gone to sleep. It didn’t feel like a conscious choice I was making, it felt like the natural development of a relationship between two parents with limited time to share with each other. Of course, most of our time together would be on my couch. But even on nights when we had a babysitter, we’d end up at restaurants in parts of town I never went to, or in movie theaters in the suburbs. Or in Costco. I was not joking about Costco.
One night, Matthew met me for a drink after a funeral for a friend’s husband. I could have invited him to the funeral, which is a pretty good date spot, but I didn’t. I had him meet me afterward at the downstairs bar. I regretted it immediately. I could tell that some of the funeral attendees had the same idea I did, not about the dating but about the drinking, and felt myself waiting to feel their eyes on me. And then it happened. A hand on my shoulder. A friend of a friend who used to work with Aaron. I couldn’t remember her name, but I pretended to know exactly who she was. Normally, when I can’t remember someone’s name, I turn to the person I’m with and introduce them. That’s what normal people do. Instead, I just faked my way through some small talk, and turned myself to face her, as if Matthew were a perfect stranger I’d been seated next to randomly. When she moved on, to a table in the back, I turned back to the bar, though not toward Matthew. We made eye contact in the mirror behind the bar, and he smiled.
I prepared an explanation in my head, a lie, of course. About how I had simply forgotten to introduce him, how I always do that, it’s nothing personal. But I didn’t have to lie to him. I thought immediately about the plaque hanging in the living room of my son’s daycare provider.
Never explain yourself
The people who love you don’t need it
The people who don’t will never believe you anyway.
Matthew didn’t need an explanation, and the weight of the moment slid from my shoulders. I didn’t need to lie. I didn’t need to explain. He got it. He got me. Matthew smoothed out some bills and placed them under his glass, catching the eye of the bartender as he stood up.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said, still only looking into the mirror.
“I know,” he replied. Matthew instinctively knew how to love me, just like Aaron had. It isn’t the same love, and they aren’t the same men. Aaron and Matthew are very different people. Aaron was tall and outgoing, the sort of magnetic person who shined a bright, warm light of inclusion on anyone he touched. I was “Aaron’s girlfriend,” and he was the star of the show. I loved that dynamic. I loved watching him shine. I loved that he could stand up in front of a crowd of strangers and do a theatrical rendition of a Céline Dion duet while I watched from the audience, laughing along. I admired him, and the way he could command the attention of an entire room of drunk people who could barely focus their eyes. When we met, I had a hard time standing up in front of a room full of my own colleagues to talk about my own ideas without spontaneously combusting. This surprises people who know me now, people who have seen me step on stage in front of a thousand people or listened to my podcast. And the only explanation I can come up with is that I took on some of Aaron’s unselfconsciousness by osmosis. Slowly, at first, through our relationship, with the balance being directly transferred to me upon his death.
Matthew is so shy that I think if a scientist offered him the opportunity to grow a turtle shell that he could pop into whenever he found himself in an overwhelming social situation, which
by his definition is anything with more than two people in attendance, he would take it. He has one flaw, and that is his insistence that he is five-eleven, even though he is clearly five-ten. I only bring this up because I think he lied about his height on his driver’s license and if there is anyone reading this who works for the Minnesota Department of Vehicle Services, please contact me immediately so we can resolve this important legal issue.
Aaron and Matthew are different, but we fell into sync the same way. We met, and we were together.
When Matthew and I met, I was open to love theoretically. Thinking about what I wanted was easy. Finding what I wanted was surprisingly easy. Enjoying what I wanted? Basically impossible. It had been when I found Aaron, too. On our second date, Aaron told me that he had just come off a decade-long relationship with the only serious girlfriend he’d had besides me. He was freshly single, and I told him to his face that I was not interested in dating him until he had taken his time. Anyone could objectively look at him and say it was just too soon to be dating someone new.
I didn’t know anything about his previous relationship, but I had a swift opinion about what should happen next. Behavior post-relationship falls into two camps. For women it goes this way. Date too soon after your relationship ends, and you’re just rebounding. Take too long and you’re dwelling on the past. But for men, these judgments are a little softer. Rushing into a relationship shows a certain softness that ladies can’t resist, and avoiding commitment makes you a desirable bachelor. For women, we are always walking the tightrope between being a floozy or an old maid. Another check in our column, am I right?
There is no standard prescription for what to do when you’ve lost love. If there were, I would have hoarded up bottles of it before my husband died, and I wouldn’t have been sitting at a bar pretending not to know a man who had most definitely seen me naked.
I told myself that I was sparing Matthew the judgment of others. If people were as harsh as I was, then everyone—including that stranger at the bar—would think it was just too soon. But the harshest judgment I felt was from me. If I loved Aaron, what was I doing falling in love with this guy? If I was still so bone-achingly sad about Aaron’s death, why was I so comforted by the feeling of Matthew’s hands on my bare skin? There is a difference between guilt and shame. Guilt says I did something bad and shame says I am bad. I had both, swirled together like a really awful twist cone. It was bad to fall in love with someone new, because I was still in love with Aaron. I was bad to fall in love with someone new, because it meant I couldn’t love Aaron. It was all bad. I didn’t need anyone to tell me what they thought. It was hard enough to deal with my own brain.
I did what any mature person would do when she finds herself the meat in a guilt and shame sandwich: I booked a flight to the other side of the country. I ran away. Not just because of Matthew, but because of Aaron. His deathaversary was coming, and the entire city of Minneapolis felt haunted and raw. I didn’t know what I would do on November 25, only that I couldn’t do it in the city where we’d fallen in love, the city where he’d died.
I fled to a city where Aaron and I had never traveled together. Somewhere roughly seventy degrees warmer than Minneapolis in November. Ralph and I spent Aaron’s first deathaversary at my friend Tyler’s house in Hollywood. If that sounds like I’m trying to brag and impress you, I completely am. Tyler and his wife would be out of town that weekend, and they offered us their very nice, very kid-free home for us to just hang out and do whatever it is you do to commemorate a monumental loss in your lives. I’d spent a year thinking about this day, and what it would mean to me. The first year after Aaron’s death was filled with a million firsts, but this would be the biggest one. Something would happen, I was sure. I would feel different, be different. I would mark this day with something meaningful. A thousand balloons released into the sky (not eco-friendly). A lantern released into the sky (not safe in dry, brittle California). There had to be some kind of meaningful ceremony I could throw together on the fly after wasting an entire year of planning time!
Indeed there was. At the moment Aaron’s death became officially one year old, Ralph and I were splitting a gluten-free pizza. We raised our glasses and had a toast.
“To Papa,” I said. “To Papa!” Ralph cheered. And then it was time for his afternoon nap.
When Aaron died, the first person I called was . . . Aaron. He was the person I called when anything big happened, and nothing was bigger than his death. Moe and I had taken that place for one another when we met. We didn’t have Andy and Aaron anymore, so we became each other’s First Call. Moe was the only person who remembered to call me on Aaron’s deathaversary. Andrew’s had just passed, and we’d laid in her bed together on that day. I remember her telling me that the day hadn’t hurt more than any other, that the anticipation of it was worse than its arrival.
When I left town, I told Matthew not to expect to hear from me. I liked him and all, but this was a special and sacred time for me and I couldn’t be distracted by him. He wasn’t to call me or text me. And he didn’t.
But I wanted him to. I wanted to tell him about this day, about how it hadn’t hurt as much as I thought it would, and how that scared me. About how Ralph had invented a little brother named Gary and would make me pretend to buckle both of them into car seats and kiss them both good night. I wanted him to know that Ralph had sat on the deck with me and watched the sun set, and then asked me to howl like a wolf with him. I wanted him to know these things, I wanted him to know that I didn’t know how to feel, about time, and memories, about the future, about the past colliding with the present, about him. About anything.
He picked up after one ring.
Chapter Fourteen
Not *That* Kind of Christian
Mom, please skip this chapter because you aren’t going to like what I have to say, and I really love your waffles.
To say that God and I have had a rocky relationship would be an exaggeration, mainly because we didn’t really have a relationship. I imagine this will be disappointing for my mother after paying for eighteen years of Catholic education, but repetition and memorization is not a form of connection.
I knew the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and could fake my way through the Apostle’s Creed, but the moment I stepped into church, my brain took a short vacation and my body took over. Sit. Stand. Sit. Stand. Sit. St-shit . . . no. Kneel? If you keep your eyes open and move your mouth enough, nobody will know that you have no idea what’s going on. I feared, as a child, that I was the only one who felt this way. That all around me were devout Catholics who found meaning in the reading of the Gospel according to That One Guy. Who could follow along with Father Whatshisface’s homily. That I was the only one who spent those sixty minutes trying to count the number of panels in each stained-glass window. I knew there must be some reason why our parents brought us here every week. Maybe I had missed it. If it were important enough for us to spend an hour a week here, all of this must mean something, but I didn’t feel anything. The words—and whatever they meant—just slid off me, like oil. After communion, my family and I would slip on our coats and slip out the side door and back into our normal lives, having crossed Religion off our to-do list. Religion was a thing we did, once a week. Like taking out the trash or ordering pizza.
All of this pains my mother, I know. She and my father both grew up Catholic, in a South Minneapolis neighborhood where each three-bedroom house was home to at least six children per family. Being Catholic wasn’t a choice for them, it was a cultural expectation. In second grade, all the children had their first communion, dressing up like tiny brides and grooms for their first taste of the body and blood of Christ. Shortly after, they’d have their first confessions, sliding into a dark booth to recite their childish sins to a man who could offer them a chore list of prayers meant to earn the forgiveness of God. And in high school, they’d been confirmed into the faith, which is basically signing a contract that says, “Yeah, I’ve looked over th
e purchase agreement, and this all looks great to me. Sign me up for a lifetime of Catholicism.” My parents had both done all these things, and baptized each of their babies into the faith, but I didn’t know why, and I never thought to ask. I assumed that whatever it meant to them had to have been explained to me at some time, and I wasn’t listening. And what kind of an idiot child needs to have religion explained to her? I certainly wasn’t bold enough, or confident enough, to raise my hand in a Cathedral with saints looming above my head and say, “Wait, what is this all about?”
Even if I’d asked these big questions, I don’t know that the people around me would have been able to clarify. Sometimes, the appeal of Catholicism seemed to be in the difficulty people had in understanding it. The bread and wine we took at communion wasn’t symbolic, it was actually the body and blood of Christ. It’s called transubstantiation, and it happens after the consecration, and you’ll need to look up both those words on your own. Even the structure of the organization felt complicated: the main boss is the pope, but there are cardinals and archbishops and bishops and priests and brothers and nuns, and they are all the boss of their own little area? I never got an org chart. The complication of it all seemed intentional: a way to make it seem more mysterious, but also more intellectual. The beauty is that it’s hard to understand, like Game of Thrones or True Detective, and if you need it explained to you, well, then I guess you aren’t cool enough to get it. Maybe?
I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND WHY ONLY men could lead a church, why the death penalty was okay but murder was wrong, why abortion was just as bad as birth control, or why our parish priest had shrugged it off when my middle school friend ran to him in desperation when his stepfather began viciously beating his mother. Jesus seemed pretty cool, but all the stuff around him felt like some real bull crap.
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