Aja Gabel on Love and Grief

I’m sitting in a Hitchcock-themed bar on a first date with the man who would become my husband, and we’re both acting strangely. I’d shown up late for a movie at the Cineramadome and spent the entire movie runtime thinking he might be annoyed at me for it. After the movie ended, he couldn’t figure out how to validate his parking, and instead of going back to the car, we walked the streets of Hollywood for a long time, fruitlessly looking for a bar to continue the night. On the walk, he told me about how he’d loved the latest Thor movie, which I immediately derided, and which he immediately tried to take back.

We finally decided to drive to a bar we knew, a place with framed horror movie stills, I considered apologizing for being judgy about Thor. Before I could get there, he apologized.

“I know I’m acting weird,” he said. “My dad just died. A month ago.”

“Oh,” I said, the rest of the bar fading away. “It hasn’t even hit you yet.”

I didn’t have to have anything about grief figured out yet.

I was repeating the truest thing anyone said to me about my own father’s death, when I was twenty-one. Just before I graduated college, I went to an eye doctor for a checkup. After the doctor dilated my eyes and turned down the lights, she took a brief medical history, which is when my brother’s and father’s deaths came up. My brother had died of a heart attack two years earlier, just before my junior year of college. My father died of cancer during my senior year.

The eye doctor hushed, put down her pen, and said, “Oh, honey. It hasn’t even hit you yet.” In the dim room with the world blurring in front of my eyes, I felt relief wash over me. She hadn’t offered a condolence I had to awkwardly accept. She had instead spoken to me from a place of knowing; she had also lost her father when she was young. It took a year or more for her to fall apart. I didn’t have to have anything about grief figured out yet.

The eye doctor turned out to be right. Grief lives most vibrantly in the periods where your life stretches and bends, the loss constant while life propels forward. My losses only grew over my formative years, like a black hole whose gravity had harnessed me. The deaths happened while I was still in college, but my life didn’t really collapse until after graduation. Suddenly I was on my own for the first time, at my first grown up job in a new city. I felt the normal loneliness of fledgling adulthood, but I was also existentially, desperately alone. I still needed my dad for everything. I needed him to explain how to do my taxes, how to navigate health insurance, how to negotiate a salary.

While test-driving a used car in the suburbs, I began to cry. “Are you all right?” the owner asked me from the passenger seat. I didn’t tell her this was my first time test-driving a car, that I had no idea what I was doing, and that I wished with my whole body I could call my dad for advice.

Few people my age had a dead parent, even fewer had a dead sibling. No one ever had both.

My brother’s death was also present, but in a more frightening way. I saw a new doctor, and disclosed my brother’s unexpected heart attack. Alarmed and trying not to show it, the doctor referred me to a cardiologist. I was the youngest person in the cardiologist waiting room, and I wondered what insurance would cover, if a dead brother was a pre-existing condition or not. The cardiologist offered no condolences but asked a million questions I didn’t know the answer to—what was the official diagnosis, was he taking medication, what was his coronary calcium score. I only knew that I had seen my father, sick from chemo, receiving a call in the middle of the afternoon from the coroner who had a final report on my brother’s cause of death. I saw him from the other room, weeping into the phone. What kind of calcium score would leave a father in tears?

None of this was useful information for the cardiologist, who sent me home with a remote heart monitor. I wore sensors stuck to my chest for 48 hours, not realizing that interactions like this would persist for the rest of my life, and be the way I spoke of my brother the most, in his young death, and in trying to delay mine.

I never spoke of any of these incidents to my peers, and that continued to be the worst part—the loneliness. Few people my age had a dead parent, even fewer had a dead sibling. No one ever had both.

I searched for years for a partner whose wounds might match mine. I met a guy whose father had died in an accident and possibly for that reason alone, I developed a crush on him. Soon, though, he got a girlfriend, a sunny blonde filling out med school applications, the kind of girl who promised a bright future. They moved in together and while I was disappointed, I loved her for him. She gave him hope. I was a walking reminder of sadness.

For a brief stint I went back to my college boyfriend, who had known both my brother and father when they were alive, who had known my family intact and happy. His own Bethesda family was posh and picture-perfect, tragedy free. I tried to leach some of that stability, but I must have felt like dead weight, and eventually we fell apart again.

When I went to graduate school a couple years later, I fell for a poet who was completely and wholly unavailable. He radiated mysterious pain, the way some poets think is required of them, the way I thought I might require. He quoted Jack Gilbert outside bars and liked that I was also in pain, even if he couldn’t (or didn’t bother to) understand the source. I pinged to his light like a dumb insect until the light went out. Then there was another poet, one who was more earnest than anyone I’d ever met. But I mistook that earnestness for an interest in damage, when it turned out he was more interested in healing. I wasn’t there yet, or sure I ever would be.

While we spoke, he had a funny look on his face—not sadness or shame, but something like a zip of anticipation, a small thrill, as if he knew that we were at the start of something.

I briefly got together with a guy whose brother had died by suicide, but his understandable coping mechanism turned out to be wariness of any serious commitments. I went on many first dates from apps, but there was never an evening where I revealed my losses and the other person met the revelation not with shock and horror but with understanding.

In my thirties, I began to understand that the black hole of grief wasn’t a disaster whose orbit I might escape, but the remnants of a disaster that orbited me, forever. I also began to think it was unlikely I’d ever find a partner who could deal with those remnants. I was becoming okay with that, because I had to. Life moves on, grief stays tethered.

And then I moved to Los Angeles, where a friend from graduate school set me up with David.

On that date, at the bar with photos of Tippi Hedren running frantically from the birds that swarmed her, I explained to David that I was only telling him what I’d found helpful from a stranger when my dad and brother died.

“Oh, I had a sibling that died, too,” he said in response. “When I was twelve, my sister died in a car accident.”

Suddenly his own disaster became visible to me, pieces of a tragedy lit up around him. My own must have glowed right back at him. He told me the Thor movie was one of the first things that made him feel light after his dad died. I promised to watch it.

We quickly confessed the gritty details of our losses without fear of alienating the other person—the sound of his mother’s voice when she called to tell him his father had died; that I couldn’t bear to go to my own brother’s funeral; how years after his sister’s death, he encountered a survivor from the car while working a Wendy’s drive-through; how I was starting to forget my dad’s voice, something I’d been too afraid to say out loud.

While we spoke, he had a funny look on his face—not sadness or shame, but something like a zip of anticipation, a small thrill, as if he knew that we were at the start of something.

And we were. Five months later, we were engaged. Six months after that, we were married. At our wedding ceremony, we acknowledged our absent fathers and siblings, and it wasn’t weird. It was part of what had pulled us together so quickly and surely. We both knew what it was like to be the alive child in the shadow of grieving parents, and what it was like to lose a father who really understood you. We had a shorthand of grief, and a fast track to love.

And then, as the eye doctor and I predicted, it hit him. In our first year of marriage, his own tiny explosions started to go off as his life began to shift, and suddenly I was witness to the same birth of a black hole that I experienced after graduation.

David’s dad was a celebrated music journalist and musician, and a year after his death, the family held a belated memorial at an iconic music venue on Sunset. It was crowded with people I’d never met who spoke fondly of his dad, telling stories of a gregarious, life-of-the-party guy who always wanted to make people laugh. As they spoke, I watched David, and saw beneath his bemusement the sick creep of time. There are moments with loss, always, where you feel the gulf between the beloved’s life and your life now growing steadily wider. Across that gulf, love and memory strain. Occasionally, you fall into that gulf.

It made sense to me, that the body would do anything to blank out the excruciating pain of grief maturing.

In the Lyft on the way home from the memorial, David was impossibly sad, belligerently bereft and muttering about death as he drifted to sleep against the window. “He just lost his dad,” I told the unsettled driver, even though it had been a year. I wanted David to remember that grief’s unpredictable sprawl was normal. I wanted to remind myself of the same.

But David continued to try to disappear in the year that followed. Like a vent to let out burning steam, every few months he would go out with friends and drink a little too much, but it got progressively worse. One night, he didn’t return home, and couldn’t tell me where he’d been. He’d blacked out and woken up in a friend’s guest house. I was shaken, but he was terrified, unable to account for a chunk of his life.

“Lost time,” I said. “It’s very scary.” It made sense to me, that the body would do anything to blank out the excruciating pain of grief maturing. Losing time was a fantastic solution to the cruel march of it. But it wasn’t a great mode in which to begin a marriage and a family.

I’d already told him the most useful thing anyone had said to me after loss, and now I told what I wished someone had said to me in my depths: Your sadness isn’t too much for me, even if it is for you. I offered my hand, and he took it.

One recent winter morning, I rolled over and found David long awake, anxiously staring at the ceiling. He’d had a dream that his father was alive, but it wasn’t the gift of an alternate reality. Instead, it was an imagined before—in the dream, David knew his father would die.

“I’ve had the exact same dream,” I told him. “Many times.” In it, I’m always a passenger in my father’s truck, talking to him about some book or movie, all the while filled with the heaviness of his certain death.

“It’s like even the fantasies are poisoned,” I said. Their loss inescapable, every narrative with them alive viscerally false. It was the kind of truth a person tried to outrun with alcohol, the wrong romantic partners, constant movement, bad choices. A monster you could never slay unless you erased the person you loved and lost, or yourself.

“Exactly,” David said.

“People think the death is the thing,” he says. “But it’s everything after.”

It’s not that we have twin wounds. We don’t. The aftermath of his teenage sister’s tragic death in a car accident was a shroud over his childhood. My brother died when he was thirty-one, leaving behind three children, which was its own complicated web of diffuse grief. Our mothers had different situations in widowhood, and our new roles in our respective families required different kinds of responsibility. But still, David and I walk parallel paths in the long half-life of loss.

Even now there are nights—two decades after my father and brother have died—where I’m lying in bed about to fall asleep, but instead I fall apart with sadness—that neither have seen what I made of my life, that I never got to see what they could have made of theirs. It’s acute but also general, a pain as engulfing as those early days after graduation.

David understands. “People think the death is the thing,” he says. “But it’s everything after.” He’s right. The loss never stops growing. He doesn’t tell me it will be okay, because he knows it won’t. It’ll just be different, maybe. Or the same.

But it is special, he thinks, that I can access this love for them after so many years. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t be able to without him across from me, a witness and a comrade.

He asks me if I want to re-watch that Thor movie he loves, which I’ve also come to love. I ask him what he loves about the character of Thor so much.

He has an answer at the ready. “So many of the superheroes came to their powers by accident—a spider bite, gamma rays, hit by lightning. But Thor is different. He comes from a kingdom in the sky, and has a whole family up there.”

“So you like him because his powers are connected to weird family lore?” I ask.

“Yeah, and when he can’t get back to that home, he makes a new home here on Earth,” he says. “Plus, my dad would have really liked this movie.”

Sometimes it’s as simple as that. Sometimes the good stuff is painful, and the painful stuff feels good. An exile that becomes home, if you can find someone to stand next to you.

What David and I both understand is that what happened to us is no longer a black hole of nothingness, but an imploded star, a supernova we carry with us, which sometimes burns brighter than others, but which is always swirling with a permanent loss. And what we’re both able to see is that if our supernovas are halos of absence, they are also nebulas made of love.

Now we have two small children, and sometimes our supernovas get activated, like when we have to explain their grandfather ghosts and would-be aunt and uncle. Sometimes, we see the threat of our losses in our children, David unnervingly vigilant about seatbelts, or me caught in a worry spiral about my family history of unpredictable hearts. I record the sound of their voices, and also our voices, so no one ever loses the memory. There we are, in the blinding brightness of loss, together.

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Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel is available from Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Random House.