Vows

My husband and I married alone. Just us and a minister we had never met before. I took the day off for an "appointment." We stood in one of the oldest churches in Philadelphia. Just some stained glass and dark wood, and we said our vows together, crying all the while. We struggled with our wedding a great deal...it was an invite everyone or no one kind of choice, and we decided to buy a house with the money we would have spent on a wedding. We often said in those early months, we will throw a wedding at our forever house in our yard with our babies all around. We will be barefoot with flowers in our hair (okay, maybe not--we dream hippie, but act nerdy). If we wait until our tenth anniversary, we will be able to enjoy ourselves in a way we couldn't back when Sam was in graduate school and we were saving for a house. I wore a tasteful black dress and a Indian wedding wrap, even though I am not Indian, and Sam wore a grey suit and his grandfather's beautiful tie. We walked out of the chapel husband and wife, a couple of blocks later we hit a low-key wine bar for a glass of champagne. We posed in rain in Rittenhouse square for pictures with a timer. Later, we had a beautiful dinner together. That night was amongst my happiest.

Looking at our picture in the park, I would never have imagined that our marriage would be challenged with the loss of our child. I imagined we would lose our grandparents, and then our parents, since that is the way of the world...the old are supposed to die before the young. I imagined we would grieve for those losses, and we have. It feels helpless to watch your partner grieve the loss of their parent, even as you grieve the loss of your in-law. It is a relationship of which you are not a part, whose in and outs you are just beginning to know. It is simply you partner deeply missing one of the two most influential people in their lives. You can only listen, hold them and sit in their sadness.

There was a time in this last nine months where I wondered how couples survived this loss. I feared for my marriage. It wasn't hysterical or nasty between us; we just went in our separate corners to lick our own wounds in our own ways. How do you maintain your relationship through the solitary process of grieving? I couldn't figure out how to get out of my own head and back into our marriage. Somehow, nine months later, we have grown more loving, more forgiving, and more attached. We have eased back into each other arms. And it wasn't a vacation, or a therapist, or long revealing talks in the middle of the night...it was just time--patiently waiting for the other person, not freaking out at our distance and the ebbs and flows of our connection. When I was very new in my grief, I loathed when someone told me time would be the great healer...you are so early, people would say. It just takes time. I mean, I knew it was true, but it meant I had to move forward in great suffering to an undisclosed location in time and space.

My grief felt dismissed by cliche, and yet time does change grief, there is no doubt. But it wasn't just time. It was patience. We just didn't assume that our distance meant something more than what it was (grief), which I can only assume helped. I know, for me, I try very hard not to think of my deep love for my husband as fated, storybook, magical, untouchable or special. That might sound weird, but I need to be reminded that we are susceptible to the same shit as everyone else. We want approval and love. Acceptance and understanding. In the midst of raw grief, you just have no energy to devote to someone else's ego. In some ways, grief is a grabby bitch--she just forces you to be self-absorbed and needy. We talked about how this suffocating grief and our distance was not symptomatic of a larger problem with us--it just meant we were missing our daughter, and figuring out how to live in this world without her. I think we are stronger now by not taking it all personally. We just gradually came back to center, not because of one event or one conversation, but a thousand little gestures of normalcy.

A few weeks ago, we went to a wedding. When the vows were read, Sam and I held hands and cried. After the ceremony, when we were sipping drinks, he said, "They just don't know in what ways their marriage can be challenged." And I nodded. What I wanted to say to the bride and groom is simply this: You never know, on one of the best days of your life, your wedding day, what "for better or for worse" is going to mean in your marriage, but you can only hope you are with the person who brings out the best in you at the worst moment.