Checking into the Heartbreak Hotel
On feeling it all, on purpose
“I love you more than anything” my wife says quietly
We’re sitting on the couch, doing our respective administrative work when she slides her hand across the cushion between us, grabbing mine
I smile at her “More than anything? More than your favorite snacks?”
She looks me in the eye, “I would never eat again if it meant that I could keep you.”
We do this a lot, her and I, volleying our affection back and forth in the extreme, giggling as we up the ante toward ridiculous. But still, I pause, the obviously exaggerated statement striking me in that way only she can, with her perfectly serious face, her tone offering no suggestion of humor. I believe her.
My mind is brought back to my lunch break the previous day. I’m sitting in my car, positioned to face the grassy clearing where baby geese are basking and snacking with their parents. I’m reading a beautifully moving Substack essay from Megan Falley 1 about the complex grief of experiencing life in the wake of her partner, Andrea’s passing. Almost as visceral as her commitment to Andrea in life and in death, Megan discusses a second agreement with herself to not turn away from pain, but rather to feel it all in brilliant abundance.
With the other half of my Panera sandwich forgotten on my passenger seat, tears dripped from my chin as I wept at the depiction of this love, lost in the physical realm for now. My thoughts flew to my wife. “I would die if anything ever happened to you” I typed out in a rapid message to her, immediately recognizing the almost callus disregard for the fact that something did happen to Andrea Gibson, and Megan Falley was currently living what I am defining as my worst nightmare. I set a hand on my aching heart, struck by the privilege of my wife’s pure availability.
There is a great book about the science of grief 2, which describes that part of the disorientation of losing someone close to us comes from them not being where our mind has always found them. On this day, my brain map automatically knew that Bianca was safe at our apartment, drinking her coffee and taking her meetings and loving our dog on a beautifully simplistic working afternoon. And it was in that momentary reflecting that I know with absolute certainty that Megan and I agree. I would live through Act 2 of the Titanic if it meant I got to experience Act 1 with Bianca. This love story is worth the price of admission.
I read a diary essay3 a few days prior to seeing Megan’s article where the writer describes prematurely grieving everything they ever love, understanding how intrinsically linked love and loss are. It dawned on me that while I never put words to this myself, I have been doing it since I was small, and have come to believe that honoring these cycles is as sacred a practice as praying the rosary. Moreover, this truth didn’t just apply to people, but all things I loved. Notably, the first experience to etch this knowing into my brain was doing theatre.
Starting from 7 years old, being part of a production was intoxicating. The process seeps into your bones and bonds you to the people you’re with nearly nightly, showing up for rehearsal with the remnants of your day still on your shoulders and having your cast mates help you brush it off. Each show becomes a part of you, the music, the costumes, the dances, the dedicated, intentional work done by dozens of people for months to create something uniquely ours. And then it ends, the set gets broken down, the costumes go to storage. Oh, god how I would mourn letting some shows go. Hot tears always ran on closing night knowing that the next experience, even if similar, would not be exactly this. This time was being laid to rest, kissed goodbye, and particularly when I was young my child heart would ache, not yet grasping the reliability of cyclical emotions. What I know now is that this feeling would return, again and again, presenting with different faces, but always coming back. And I would grab it’s hand every time, despite the knowing, or possibly because of the knowing.
Maybe this is the reason that I have leaned into the macabre for as long as I can remember. Whether it’s filling my belly with air to lend my voice to devastating lyrics, cozying up with tissues for a tragic movie, or ravenously consuming a soul crushing book, I have craved the depth of emotions, never satisfied with the surface. While therapeutic training discourages me from over identifying with any one emotion, there has always been something about heartbreak that clicks in my brain as the most human part of being alive, and I have always wanted to be cell-quakingly alive. Nothing has brought that feeling more abundantly than all of the people and things I have loved in my life. The loved and lost family that I will never embrace again in this timeline, friends and friendship break ups that felt like they crumbled the foundation of my life, my animals and their passing that left a forever hole, jobs that I had to move on from after growing to rely on them and adore my coworkers, lovers who were never meant to be forever but who consumed whole periods of my past. And none making me feel more alive, more present, than the love I feel now.
Andrea Gibson wrote beautiful words about life, and love (which are the same, if we haven’t put that together yet). Words that inspire chest-cracked-wide-open, heart on your sleeve type of living. A concept that has been a theme of mine this year, and to me, grief is an inextricable part of that. I have learned that the more closed off I am to allowing others to see me and my fullness, the lonelier I am. And I am unwilling to have a life that does not honor the full spectrum of what can be felt. If that means holding my beating heart out in my shaking palm with full knowledge it will likely be destroyed, well, then sign me up. I would tolerate any amount of loss, grief grabbing me by the throat, holding my head beneath a sea of stollen moments. I will do all of that, to spend today next to my wife, typing our emails.