Grief Is Love by Marisa Renee Lee

Author:Marisa Renee Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

6

Intimacy…

I MET MY husband, Matt, four years after my mother died. I quickly learned that finding your way back to unconditional love after grief is akin to finding your way out of a house of mirrors at a carnival. It is dizzying, overwhelming, and to maintain an intimate relationship or build a new one is unfathomable. When you’ve loved someone fully and let them love you back, and then they died, subconsciously you’re reminded about death when it comes to love, more than life. I found myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. Who might die next? My dad, my godmother, my grandparents, who knew. Sometimes it seems easier to just walk away from ever loving someone again than to expose yourself to the possibility of that type of grief ever again. But that’s impossible. I couldn’t stop loving my family, and I couldn’t stop myself from falling in love with Matt. The depth and the ordinariness of grief are most obvious when you realize that you love someone new.

I knew early on that Matt was worth whatever fear I needed to manage in order to be in a healthy relationship with him, and as I mentioned, I went to therapy to accomplish that. Matt and I met on the dating site eHarmony. On an otherwise unremarkable weeknight, I found myself on a date on a blustery evening in January with a guy from Green Bay, Wisconsin. I learned within about twenty minutes that he had been married before, was a die-hard Packers fan, and was missing half of one of his fingers. I was definitely intrigued. At the time, I was working for President Obama, owned my apartment, and thought I’d finally succeeded in fully “getting over” the loss of my mom. I felt fine, and then this guy showed up. Our relationship was new, exciting, and life-changing, and therefore brought up new and uncomfortable feelings of grief.

With the help of therapy, this new wave of grief subsided, and I realized the work of grief and learning to love again after loss is never-ending. My new commitment to Matt was emotionally triggering for me over and over again.

One day after I’d sort of figured out how to be an adult in a loving relationship with another adult, after many good days spent watching Packers games, eating too much food, or going for hikes in the D.C. area, Matt and I got into one of our first, and worst, fights. It was over something so small, I don’t remember what it was, but I just wanted to get away from this man. I wanted to, but I had nowhere to go in the 650-square-foot studio we shared. I had just finished cooking dinner, so I just stuck my head in the refrigerator. I was pretending to look for something, but really I was just hiding and trying to control my rage. After maybe forty-five seconds, Matt asked, “Are you just going to hang out in the refrigerator all night?” This was obviously an appropriate response to my childish behavior, and we both started cracking up.

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