Sometimes just being there is best
Three years ago, I got married in the middle of the week, in the middle of September, in the middle of nowhere. The only people invited were my and my fiancé’s parents. I put the wedding together faster than I planned all-night games of Manhunt — like tag, not like video games — in high school. The hotel handled the food; I did my own glam, such as it was; there was no photographer, no music. I wore a dress — cocktail-length off-white — that I already had.
I missed having my sisters and best friends there, medium-desperately, but we were on a schedule incompatible with wedding planning: my husband’s mother had been, a while before we met, diagnosed with terminal cancer, and when it was obvious (and it was immediately obvious) that Simon and I wanted to get married, we agreed to do it like now, so his mom could be there.
At our first-anniversary party, where we included her favourite flowers in an inadequately reverent acknowledgement of her absence, Simon said in his toast that he appreciated that I was willing to shotgun our wedding, which surprised me: it wasn’t any kind of sacrifice. It was, honestly, the only thing I could think of doing.
It felt the same to me as taking Simon’s surname, which I did only because it was something I could do to publicly nod at how much I loved him. (The fact that Simon didn’t care whether I changed my name or not also made it an easy decision). With earlier boyfriends, I’ve been a therapist, manager, social director and chef; I showed them how I felt by “helping” and “doing.” Simon — who is the oldest of five kids; who is stable and slightly repressed, in the Gen X mode; who has had some kind of job since he was 13 — didn’t need any of that, not now and not in his grief. Still, I earnestly tried to organize, shop, clean, cook and talk through some of his pain, even though there was nothing, specific or symbolic, I could “do” to help him.
Supporting someone you love through any kind of loss is a challenge when you show love by “helping” and “doing.” Even losses of the “fired” or “dumped” variety require the same difficult simplicity of just being there, being present, bearing witness. It’s usually the best way to help someone enduring depression, or transition, or when a friend is dating someone they know sucks, but aren’t ready to break up with yet. It can be useful to handle the more banal stuff of life for someone else — phone calls, errands — and maybe add some pops of what I call “little nices” (a bag of preferred candy, a note in a suitcase, a massage). These actions will never equal the feeling of love, or its intentions, but when Simon did ask me to do something, or I thought he’d like something small, I executed like my married life depended on it. Stakes were so high, so soon. We were still new, and didn’t know each other that well, and I’d never had a relationship that was just, you know, normal, where the right thing was more about breathing steadily beside someone instead of shooting off fireworks because it’s your three-week-iversary. I had to learn everything, all at once.
Eventually, and I mean months later, I realized that my relationship-anxiety about doing it right was having the opposite effect — I was being annoying, not useful — and so I stopped asking what I could do, and stopped trying to orient his defining loss around me, my needs, and our relationship. It was, after all, “an unfixable, unwinnable war,” per Simon, and the only thing there was to do was nothing.