As Patton Oswalt put it, it’s like getting struck by lightning twice. It feels inconceivable to get another shot at love like this. People grieve deeply because they love deeply. It’s all part of the agreement we make when we fall in love. And when I am swept away by my love for Billy, I think about the sobering fact that I may one day lose and grieve him too. When I’m in the throes of missing Jamie, I try to remind myself that my pain is a reflection of how much I loved him. He would want you to be happy again, and we want you to be happy again." "I never knew how I would feel when you dated again, but I’m happy for you," Jamie’s mom wrote me after I told her about Billy. I’ve worried-a lot-about how people would respond to my relationship, but I’ve been buoyed by the encouragement I’ve received. I remember what it’s like to love and be loved, to be supportive and feel supported, and to care deeply for someone else and to be wrapped in caring and kindness in return. Sometimes, though, I relax and everything falls into place. I’m either not properly honoring the past or not fully living in the present. Sometimes it feels as if I’m not able to love them the right way. It’s like I’m in a relationship with two men at once: my dead husband and my thankfully alive boyfriend. But love has a funny way of inspiring you to double down on joy, even though it’s never guaranteed.ĭating as a widow isn’t easy. We both know that things don’t always work out the way that you plan. Now we dream about our own future together, which sometimes seems like an especially daring thing to do.
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Like me, he has to contend with a past that was once full of promise, and a future that will never be. Although Billy’s grief is different from mine he has a marriage to mourn too. We live together, in the house that Jamie and I once lived in, and we’re learning endless lessons about what it means to love someone who has deeply loved someone else. As our relationship progressed, we were forced to face a difficult truth: Opening our hearts to someone new meant opening ourselves to the possibility of loss all over again.īilly and I have been partners for more than a year now. We took things slow and frequently checked in to make sure we both felt comfortable. The coffee date led to a long walk, which led to a second date, which led to a third date, which led to our first kiss. Eventually we decided to meet for coffee.
We commented on each other’s Instagram Stories, noting how much we appreciated someone else being vulnerable instead of posting only the surface-level, feel-good things that tend to populate social media. I was a few weeks away from the one-year anniversary of Jamie’s death, and Billy, unbeknownst to both of us, was a few months away from divorce.Īs we worked through our individual losses, we would share bits and pieces of our pain online. He was performing music at the same event, and we connected online afterward as friends. I considered dating a distraction from the present, not a promise for the future.īilly and I met at a talk I gave about-wait for it-losing Jamie.
All of this, of course, was unfair to my companions. I told myself that none of these men could compare to Jamie, that I’d never be as happy as I once was. The truth is that I wasn’t that emotionally invested in whether or not those relationships worked out. That had promise, but there was ultimately too much sadness between the two of us. I even tried a long-distance romance, with a widower whose wife had died just a month before Jamie did. I went on dates with a lawyer, a sculptor, and an adjunct professor. I tried seeing a Jaime, who pronounced his name the same way my Jamie did. Nor did they last with the guy who got squeamish every time I brought up death. Things didn’t work out with my dead husband’s doppelgänger.