How to Love a Widower
When our thirteen-year-old son finds my husband’s wedding band from his first marriage, I am unprepared. This piece of my husband’s history had yet to find its rightful place in our lives together; a piece that, after fifteen years, I was still reckoning with.
We hadn’t told our children about their father’s past, that before we met, he had been married, living in a small ranch house in the suburbs of New Jersey, when his wife at age twenty-nine died from a heart attack. It was my husband’s story, one belonging to the before. We existed in the after.
My son sits on the rug holding a shoebox he discovered on the top shelf of the den closet, among old photo albums and DVDs nobody watches. It startles me, seeing the ring. I didn’t know it was there. His eyes spark with excitement, thinking he’s discovered an heirloom. This, for him, is treasure.
“Whoa!” he says, hunched over the ring. “What is this?” He examines the band, the thick brushed silver with its shiny rolled edges. All the nerve endings in my body feel exposed. I resist the urge to grab it from him, hide it.
“Uh . . . it’s Dad’s,” I falter.
He slips the ring on his finger. The band wobbles loosely.
My hands turn to bricks in my lap.
I can hear my husband’s muffled voice through the ceiling on a work call.
“Put it away,” I say. “You can ask Dad about it later.”
He drops the ring into his palm, mesmerized.
Then he finds the inscription.
“Who’s Judy?” he asks, looking up at me.
When I first met my husband, he was a thirty-three-year-old widower, and I needed instructions. It was the beginning of the 21st century, and I waited through the buzz and hum of my phone jack working its magic until I was connected to the world’s largest card catalogue. I typed my trouble into the search engine: what to do if you’re jealous of a dead person; how to date someone who lost a spouse; my boyfriend’s wife died . . . I waited for an answer, but all the advice that eventually loaded was about divorce, getting over betrayal, anger at an ex; everything dealt with Choice. But how could you fall in love with someone who had never chosen to end their previous relationship? How could a person fall in love when they never fell out of love?
Despite my best efforts to protect myself from a “complicated relationship,” I found myself stumbling into love, meanwhile constructing a faulty set of instructions on how to love a widower:
- Deny: Despite the ring he still wears on his right hand. Despite the photos you’ve peeked at from their honeymoon. Tell yourself, everyone’s happy at twenty-nine; everyone looks blissful in Aruba. Tell yourself, New Jersey, as if somehow that gauges the potential for happiness in a marriage. Tell yourself, not that long, as if significance can be measured in time. Believe all the love songs—never loved anyone like you before . . . . Tell yourself they are singing about you.
- Compete: Believe the lyrics again. You are the most . . . the only . . . the one . . . . Of course, they are singing about you. Weigh time together as if collecting points, each year a bonus round! Ignore the fact that there is no medal to be won. Forget you are competing with a ghost.
- Repeat: Other people will need convincing, too.
Finally, submit yourself to second place. Second choice. Get comfortable there. There is no sine qua non. That would make you a monster.
When my husband and I started dating in New York, we liked to walk the city streets without a plan. He’d ride the bus into Port Authority, and I’d meet him off the subway from my studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. It was my last year of graduate school, the last year of my twenties. My friends convinced me to try Match.com, and I thought of it as Research, the perfect combination of low-risk, non-committal, and adventurous; I was putting myself out there, into the lives of strangers. If anything, it was something to do to feel less lonely in a city with over eight-million people living wall-to-wall between them. I’d stay up late listening to my modem loading potential boyfriends onto my laptop while millions of people fell in and out of love.
His relationship status read: tell you later. A freelance web designer and drummer, he had an East Coast sarcasm that was foreign to my midwestern sensibility. Despite our differences, we had surprising facts in common: our birthdays a few days apart; left-handed; older sisters with the same name; raised by Jewish mothers and Mediterranean fathers; my father and his mother died a month apart. We took it as a sign and decided to meet for coffee at The Grey Dog in the West Village. We talked about our families, music, travels. He made me laugh. I liked his hiking boots. He offered me his brownie, which I declined, and then his umbrella when we stepped out into the rain, which we shared.
On our second date, at a Mexican restaurant on the Lower East Side, he revealed over his bowl of chicken tortilla soup the meaning of his relationship status. I told him I was sorry. He said he wanted to love again.
I had an idea about love—that it was singular, finite, that in each of our romantic luscious hearts, there is a space reserved for that mysterious one and only. A perfect missing piece to a puzzle. Maybe I can blame the love songs. I blame all the love songs. I wanted a first wedding. A first first dance. And yet, something kept drawing us closer together. He held my hand with his left. I tried to ignore the ring he still wore on his right.
After my husband and I had our son, we talked about whether we’d tell him about our pasts, about his first marriage. Maybe when our son got older, my husband decided. An ancient fear stirred in me. Would our son question the legitimacy of our marriage? Put into his mind the same insecurities that I had wrestled with when we first met? Would it make him wonder whether his father truly loved his mother? My husband looked at me like a man who sees his wife struggling to concoct reason from lunacy. I flailed about in a battle in which the only opponent was myself.
An unspoken addendum revealed itself:
- Don’t tell the kids.
Now, my son is looking between the inscription on the ring and me, asking again, “Who’s Judy?”
He’s waiting for an answer. I don’t know what to do. The moment tips toward me. I steal what does not belong to me.
“There’s something you don’t know.” I want to shut it down, start over. But he is perched, waiting, holding the ring, and I am holding a bomb.
“Before I knew Dad, he was married,” I say in one breath, as though trying to protect him from the impact.
My son’s eyes grow large. “Really? What happened?”
“She died suddenly. A year before I met Dad.”
“Whoa.” He sets the ring carefully back into its box. “Her name was Judy?” he asks and the tenderness in his voice moves me.
I nod. “Ask Dad about it. He’ll tell you more.”
I wait for the aftershock, but he asks no more questions. I am struck by the fact that we are still here, sitting together in the den, the roof intact, the house still standing.
“Are you OK?” I ask.
“Yeah, why?” He puts the shoebox away. “Can I go play basketball?” he says, already out the door, running off to find his friend.
I sit alone in the aftermath.
I text my husband from downstairs. T. found your wedding band. I told him briefly. He will ask you more later.
I hear my husband’s voice upstairs pause in the middle of his work call, then keep going.
Later, we talk about it. My husband and I sit on the den couch, knee to knee, like we’re kids at a sleepover, divulging secrets. “I’m so sorry,” I tell him. “I didn’t know what to do.” But he seems happy, relaxed. Says our son didn’t seem fazed by it or have many questions when they finally talked, that he was glad our son knew.
Then he talks about the night Judy died. How he drove to the hospital, but never got to say goodbye. We tread carefully, though it’s not our first time, but it is different now. As I listen, I feel something physical shifting inside of me, making space. I move over, make room for her. He touches my knee. I lean toward him.
A few months later, when my lifelong friend dies, I call my other friends every time I miss her voice. But nothing makes the loss more bearable. The contours and edges of her absence are in the specific shape of her. Nobody can take her place.
It seems so simple, so obvious now. Everyone inhabits their own space. I wonder why it took me so many years to understand.
My husband keeps the ring in its box in the closet. We talk about the past more freely now, his first marriage, and I like the way it weaves into and out of our present. It is part of the fabric that makes him whole. There is no first choice, second choice. Neither negates the other. In a sense, we’re all sine qua non. The ghosts of our pasts guide us as we wrap our arms around each other.
Finally, I realize the love songs are right. They were right all along. They are singing about me.
Just as they were also singing about her.
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