Matthew didn’t get to meet my dad, which is a tragedy because my dad would have had so much fun with him. Not with him actually, but with making fun of him in his presence. My dad loved making fun of vegetarians, Wisconsinites, and anyone who dated me, making Matthew a perfect trifecta for mockery. Matthew had grown up in small-town Wisconsin, a state that brags about having the most bars per capita. He’d briefly attended the University of Wisconsin, which has a sports rivalry with the University of Minnesota, which my father attended. Neither Matthew nor my dead dad particularly care for sports, but a rivalry is a rivalry, I suppose. After dropping out of college, which my father had also done, Matthew moved to the Big City: Minneapolis. He lived in dilapidated houses with too many other boys his age, played drums in bands I have never heard of, and, surrounded by punk vegetarians, swore off meat when he was eighteen years old. Not for any reasons surrounding humane treatment of animals, but mainly just to fit in. My dad would have had a field day with this guy.
“Oh, great, a vegetarian. You want my wife to make you a mushroom steak? Maybe that’s how they do things in Wisconsin, but not here, pal.”
“Nora, can you kindly explain to your friend from Wisconsin that we remove our shoes before entering a person’s home? Was he born in a barn?”
“Matthew, would you like a cup of coffee? Is cream okay? Or is that not vegetarian?”
All of these things make my dad sound like some kind of meathead, when really, he was just a geek who liked crossword puzzles and Anthony Trollope and whose love language was mockery.
So, Matthew never got to be roasted by my dad. Instead, he got the next best thing: meeting my entire family all at once, during Sunday brunch. These are a regular thing for our family. Brunch is easier than trying to arrange dinner with a bunch of little kids with early bedtimes and too many activities. Plus, brunch tastes better. It’s mainly sugar. My mother typically hosts, and provides the waffles and coffee. My siblings and I provide . . . nothing, really. We show up, with our hungry, crabby kids, and let them run wild through our mom’s house while we all catch up at the dining room table. If you’re expecting a big scene wherein my family is overly protective of their widowed sister, and really puts her potential mate through the wringer in order to test his mettle? Well, be prepared to be as disappointed as I was, because they welcomed Matthew into the McInerny fold as if he had always been there. In other words, they treated him like he was nothing special. My mother’s first feedback about Matthew was that we already have a Matthew in the family, and would need to call him something else. I suggested Matty, but she claimed that she sometimes called her brother that, which I had never actually heard her do, but I let it slide. Eventually, Matthew was renamed Marty against his will, because an uncle we barely ever see shares the same name as millions of adult men in America. Matthew had been a vegetarian for eighteen years, but my mother put a plate of bacon in front of him anyway, and eventually, he caved and ate a piece. She makes very good bacon and is a very persuasive presence when it comes to salty breakfast meats, and most things if I’m being honest.
Before this brunch, when we had been dating a few weeks, we were wandering the aisles of Costco looking for a particular kind of sock Matthew swears by when he asked me if I wanted to meet his parents.
“Sure,” I said, trying to decide if the twenty-pack of full-butt-coverage underwear was a good deal.
“They live five minutes away,” he replied, and I realized he meant “Do you want to meet my parents in five minutes.”
My answer was still “sure,” even though I hadn’t washed my hair in several days and had slept in the yoga pants I was wearing. Meeting the parents last minute? I live for this shit. Matthew’s mother, Shari, does not live for this shit. She does not enjoy a drop-in from her beloved son and the only lady friend they’ve met since his divorce on a November Saturday while she’s sorting through Christmas decorations. She answered the door and went into complete shock, as if I had presented her with Matthew’s severed head. “You’re . . . you’re very tall,” she said, and immediately and endlessly apologized for her messy house. It was the cleanest house I had ever been in, but I forgave her anyway because that’s the kind of person I am. In the hour or so I spent on their couch, Jim and Shari gave me a very convincing pitch for Matthew. Did I know he was the valedictorian of his college class? That he gave a commencement speech? They had taped it, and they could probably find it somewhere. Did I know that Matthew had walked at nine months old? That he was the best dad they had ever seen? I had just watched this man do a price comparison of peanut butter in Costco, but this endorsement made his stock soar. This was a good guy. I left their house with a full heart, and with a bottle of Perrier for the road. Matthew’s mom and dad even walked us out to the car and hugged us each good-bye.
A few weeks later, he met my whole family, got his new nickname, and that was it. We’d met the parents. It was a lock. But we hadn’t met all of the parents.
I married Aaron knowing I was marrying his family, just like he was marrying mine. We would go to dinner with our parents regularly, and Aaron and my brothers hung out without me often enough that it sometimes hurt my feelings because I like Marvel movies, too, okay?
After the funeral, though, Aaron’s death settled in between me and everyone I considered family. None of us knew what to do with this expansive sadness, but the gulf was biggest between me and Kim, Aaron’s mother. We still saw one another, we still loved one another, but we couldn’t do the grief together.
Even if you’re surrounded by people you love, figuring out grief is a solo project. Aaron was loved by many, and was a loss to many. But he was (to my knowledge) only my husband. And (STET) he was Kim’s only son.
Kim is the illustration of the perfect mother-in-law. Her nails and lips are always red. Her voicemails are, at a minimum, ninety seconds long. She will not send a text message without a heart emoji or an xoxo. She remembers to send a card for every holiday, and she always, always leaves any home tidier than she found it. From the day we met, I loved her, and I loved how much she loved Aaron, which was different from how most of my boyfriend’s moms had loved them, which was for some reason always borderline romantic, and made me feel like the other woman. I love a mama’s boy, but I don’t want to compete with my boy’s mama, ya know?
Most of my friends have really great stories about their nightmarish mothers-in-law, and I do someday plan on being that MIL to whomever my children marry, but Kim is and always was just . . . wonderful. Which does not make for good stories, as you can tell. “My mother-in-law is always so good to me!” doesn’t have the same intrigue as “My mother-in-law once brought our toddler as a third wheel on a Match.com date when she was supposed to take him to music class.”
I’d married Aaron, and I’d married his whole family. We just didn’t know how to be family without him.
There isn’t really a guidebook out there called How to Tell Your Mother-in-Law You Are Dating Again. I would write one, but I am not qualified to do it because I didn’t have to sit Kim down and tell her about Matthew. She did all the work for me. I was sitting on her couch in early December, waiting for Ralph to wake up from his nap in her guest room. She’d poured us each a drink, and we sat on the couch and gossiped. Gossiping with Kim makes me miss Aaron. Aaron was a great gossip—prolific, though never cruel—and just when she was getting to the good part of her story, she paused and switched topics.
“I just want you to know, that someday you’re going to meet someone, and I know that. I hope you do. You’re wonderful, and I love you. I just always want to be in your life.”
She had been nervous to say this to me, I could tell. Not because her voice shook, or because she was fidgeting, but because the words came out in such a precise and measured way that I knew she had practiced it many times, had probably meant to bring it up to me for months. This realization crushed me. This was her reaching across the space that Aaron left. All I had to do was meet her halfway. I said all the ri
ght things. Of course she would always be in my life. Of course she would always be Ralph’s Mae Mae.
I said “of course” but I knew why she had to say it out loud: because death is loss compounded. You lose your son, or your husband, and then what do you lose? More people. Lots of people. Not to death itself, but as the emotional aftermath. I’d lost people. Kim had lost people. And we’d almost lost one another.
I said of course and then I said actually. Actually, I had met someone. His name is Matthew.
“Matthew,” she said, like it was a word she was learning for the first time. “And he’s nice? Of course he’s nice.”
She had not had time to rehearse this part—the reaction—so our conversation stumbled and meandered. She was glad to hear I’d met him through Moe. She was glad to hear he was divorced, and a dad. Her second husband, who had helped her raise Aaron and his little sister, was also a divorced dad. They’re a good choice. We were interrupted by Ralph, who had woken up from his nap and wandered into the living room, where the two women who love him the most on this planet were wiping tears from their eyes and holding hands. Puffy-eyed and warm from sleep, still sucking his little thumb, he snuggled in between us both.
DATING ME IS A FORM of exposure therapy, in that you will be exposed to a lot of things that make you uncomfortable and will subsequently need therapy.
Say, for example, that I’m officiating my dead husband’s best friend’s wedding three months into our relationship: you’re going to carpool to the ceremony with my toddler and my dead husband’s mother. She’ll pick you up around five if that’s okay.
Matthew and Mae Mae had met briefly just before the wedding, but I thought that the forty-five-minute drive to the middle of nowhere would be good for both of them. This was also about efficiency. Not just for our limited fossil fuels, but emotionally. Why not have an uncomfortable, emotional introduction when you have three quarters of an hour to spend in a car together before a life event that will already be uncomfortable and emotional for all of us? Mae Mae and Matthew did not instantly bond during that one car ride. They talked about what they had in common: me and Ralph. There were some prolonged silences, Matthew told me on our own drive home from the wedding, but overall it was . . . nice. It was February in Minnesota, so the wedding should have been accessorized with a blizzard, or at least some sweeping, subzero winds. Instead, it was uncommonly warm that day. Not “Minnesota warm,” which is anything above freezing, but warm-warm. Low seventies warm. This happens sometimes—a summer day plopped into the middle of winter—and it confuses not just the poor humans who had planned on a winter wedding and are now sweating in their February best, but confuses nature, too. Some trees were budding new leaves, a few perennials poked up through the still-too-frozen ground. Everything around us seemed stuck between two seasons, not quite sure if it was time to grow. I had been at the wedding venue for hours by the time Matthew and Mae Mae arrived. And the air that came with them through the door smelled almost like spring. They walked in step with one another: Mae Mae holding Ralph, and Matthew holding Ralph’s bag of snacks and toys and other things he can’t live without. They were still strangers to each other, but they were my family, and they’d grow to be each other’s family, too.
Chapter Seventeen
In the Darkness
Uncle Dennis, my father’s older brother, is special for many reasons, chief among them being that he has never used the internet.
Uncle Denny doesn’t have an email address, because email doesn’t work with typewriters. Since childhood, he’s sent me letters typed on a typewriter or written in his perfect cursive, letters I keep to this day.
There is really no way around sorrow of this depth, this breadth. He writes after Aaron and my dad have died.
It simply has to be gone through. When I come to in the morning, before I’m fully awake, I have this vague, weighty sense of unease, as if there is something radically wrong with the world, and I don’t quite know what it is.
Then I remember.
We continue to grope about in the darkness.
They are in the light.
That is what I’ve felt like all of these months, like I am groping about in the darkness, waking up in a world I hadn’t expected to occupy. But there is no way through it except through it.
“Have you grieved?” my therapist asked, and I answered her quickly and with not a little annoyance.
“Yes.” Next question?
Her next question was “How?”
“Uh, crying?”
She pushed, and I pushed back. In between checking things off my to-do list, achieving things, constantly staying in motion so as not to feel too much, I had cried sometimes!
Was that . . . not grief?
Sure. Yes. That is grief. But grief is so much more! Grief deserves a rebrand. Something like, Grief: so much more than just crying!
I was now seeing my therapist once a week, because something troubling was happening. Something deeply disturbing. I was, at times, happy. And that happiness triggered a deep, dark sadness to well up inside of me. I wanted it to stop, please.
I believed that these were two opposing forces at work, but they were just one: love. Grief is a by-product of love. We don’t grieve what we don’t love. We may feel slightly bummed about losing something we liked, but we don’t grieve for it. And I had really, really loved.
That spark I felt with Matthew ignited something inside of me again. Not only the flames of new love, but my love for Aaron. Both of them were burning, and I felt like I would be consumed by it all. The grief that I had tried to skate through was catching up with me. And it was complicated. It was complicated because there was just so much of it! Aaron had been sick our entire marriage. I’d lost our second child at twelve weeks. My dad had died. And the world had just kept turning. Had my father died and my husband been healthy, I’d have leaned on Aaron. Had Aaron died and my dad been healthy, I’d have leaned on my father and my entire family. When both happened, I did expect everyone to rally around me, to hold me up by the armpits and launch me back into the world. But being Midwestern, I kept those expectations to myself, and quietly tallied how often they were not met. That huge wave of love and attention and help we received in the midst of Aaron’s death had slowly evaporated. Not maliciously, but because people can’t spend their entire lives focused on meeting your needs when they have their own lives to attend to. Why did my siblings—my best friends—not understand that I needed them to abandon their own lives and families and focus all of their attention on me? Why did they not show up, without being asked, to help me parent my child? To help me hang my Christmas lights or rake my leaves? Why didn’t I ask them to? My self-isolation reinforced my belief that I was alone in this, that nobody could possibly understand. Nobody could possibly stand to be with all of this pain.
Except that Matthew totally could. Cue grief explosion.
One night, I sat up reading as Matthew slept. Under the covers, I noticed his legs, strong and healthy. And then they weren’t his legs anymore, and it wasn’t my bed. I was back in the hospital bed with Aaron, his thin legs—just bone covered in pale skin—sinking into the mattress. When I came back, I was crying, and Matthew was awake.
“What’s the matter? What happened?”
I pushed him away and took my phone to the guest room, where I called Moe. It was after midnight, and she answered immediately.
It took minutes for me to say anything, and she waited.
“I get it.” She said, “Aaron’s dead. And Matthew’s not.”
That’s exactly it. Aaron’s dead. And Matthew isn’t. The two facts are not related to one another, but they push against one another in my brain and in my heart. Because I get Matthew, and Matthew gets me, and Aaron just . . . died. That’s objectively unfair.
“What would be fair?” my therapist wants to know. I don’t have an answer. That we all die, but just a little bit? That we all end up alone, and lonely, forever?
Once, when a nea
r-stranger was admiring the ring on my right finger, I explained to her that it had been a gift from Aaron. “Oh,” she said, then gestured toward Matthew. “How does he feel about that?” The implication was that it must bother Matthew greatly, me parading this simple piece of brass around, a physical reminder that I loved another human.
“Well,” I wanted to say, “as you can imagine, just the sight of it throws him into a jealous rage. He wants to wipe Aaron and his memory from the face of this earth and from my brain and my heart! I’m surprised he hasn’t chopped off my finger yet!”
But I can’t say that, because it isn’t true. Aaron is not a four-letter word in our world. He’s there in portraits that hang on our walls, in the tattoos on my body, in the child we had together who looks 110 percent like Aaron and 0 percent like me. But Matthew doesn’t resent Aaron, or resent me for still loving him.
Of course people are shocked that Matthew can handle the fact that I love another man while I also love him. We’re used to people having loved before, we aren’t used to the idea that those loves could coexist, that they could happen at the same time. We assume that love is easily controlled and redirected, a series of switches you turn off and on, like the fuse box in your basement. I would personally love an emotional fuse box that let me feel one thing at a time, and if there are any scientists reading this, please get on it. I would love to feel just happy at happy times, and sad only at sad times. I would love to have clear delineations between my feelings. But as it is, they are all strands in a thread, all tangled up with one another.
I fell in love with Matthew, in spite of myself. Every attempt I’d made to scare him away had failed. He was sticking by me, even though I read him sad poetry, words that made me cry so hard I could barely even talk. And now I was snapping into flashbacks and crying openly because I was safe. Because I was in love. I had someone to hold me while I cried, and to take out the garbage for me. I had someone who could love me while I loved someone else. I wasn’t alone in the darkness anymore. I was starting to see a light. And still I cried. And still, he loved me back.
No Happy Endings Page 11