My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me

by Jason B. Rosenthal

  Of course, family isn’t always blood; and leading the pack of close, true friends who were there to see the kids and me through the darkest times and walk me toward the light again were Jeff and Dave, who’ve been my sidekicks for over fifty years.

  I met Jeff in a parochial nursery school in Chicago. Dave made his entrance a year later, in kindergarten. We have been best friends ever since. Dave was my best man at Amy’s and my wedding, and Jeff was the contractor when Amy and I built our dream house. Our wives became friends and shared mad mutual respect. Jeff’s wife became one of Amy’s closest friends, and our daughters are close in age and have a special bond. Dave’s son is very much my nephew. Over our five decades together, “my boys” and I have been through births, bar mitzvahs, wins and losses, successes and failures, marriages, and, ultimately, loss together. The support I felt and continue to feel from these two guys and their families is difficult to describe, beyond saying that they were and are just there for me, plain and simple, and it means everything.

  Courtesy of Brooke Hummer

  The three of us know that we can say anything to one another with zero judgment. Over the course of our lives, that has morphed from childhood silliness to girls in high school to issues relating to long-term marriages and raising children. After I lost Amy, they found ways to connect with me on a deeper level, whether that was more meaningful phone conversations about how I was feeling—yes, guys do have the capacity to talk about emotions—or spontaneous texts about a moment that reminded them of Amy. These guys, along with several other of my good friends, were excellent at distracting me as well. Our tradition of seeing our favorite blues artist, our childhood friend Dave Specter, became a welcome distraction from the depths of grief. This process was new for all of us, and even though they too were grieving the loss of their dear friend, they figured out how to be there in a perfect way for me.

  This quote from a Friends episode takes on new meaning for me as I think about all of these guys: “Friends don’t let friends suffer from jellyfish stings.”

  And then there were the kids.

  They were on my mind every minute, and I was frightened. Not about them. They’re amazing young adults, and I’m so proud of them. They’d been Herculean every step of the way, from their mom’s initial diagnosis to her death to her memorial service. They comforted me every bit as much as I comforted them.

  No, what I was frightened about was my ability to be a single parent.

  Amy and I had countless conversations about this very topic in her final weeks. It is one of the gifts I feel I received from having the time to be with her at the end stage of her life. Not everyone is as fortunate—if the loss is sudden and unexpected, for example. In those super-intimate moments, I would ask Amy how I could be the best parent in her absence. How could I handle the milestones and the spaces in between? Amy would think about it long and hard and then say with confidence, “You are an amazing dad. You have such a special relationship with each one of the kids. You don’t need to think too hard about it. They love and respect you.” She emphasized that I “could do it.” Honestly, I am unsure if I could have without her clear affirmation that we all would be okay. Still, Amy was so incredibly gifted at having that “mother wit.” As dudes, we sometimes just don’t get it.

  That is not meant to be a sexist statement. I feel as if I was incredibly involved and competent at a lot of child-rearing issues. But there’s something special, even irreplaceable, about a mother-child relationship. Period. There were college graduations coming up. I was destroyed, imagining trying to plan the right celebrations, and counsel and guide our kids through career decisions and job searches. Weddings? Come on. How could Amy not be here for those? How could I navigate them alone? Amy always knew what to say, when to hug, when to give space, when to be firm, and when to simply love like only a mother can. Now she was gone, and I was still here, feeling like I could never begin to make up the difference.

  My first major single-parenting test arrived when my son Miles’s graduation came along in May 2017. We were going to Atlanta for the graduation. Now, there was no typical AKR list to follow. All of the details were on me. It is not that this was a hard thing to pull together, but I was not used to having all of this fall on me. Booking flights and hotels. Making fun dinner reservations. Writing creative cards, planning a good toast—okay, that was my specialty—and bringing together my mother-in-law and my mom.

  Amy had some forethought here as well. Our family has a tradition of making signs and posting them all over the kitchen at significant moments in our lives, big and small. Examples include birthdays, welcome-home signs, first and last day of school, and so forth. In her final months, she made signs for Miles’s graduation. I brought them with me. They were not the typical witty, word-punny sorts that Amy usually made, but the significance of the moment was clear. This added an entirely different layer of emotion to an already sentimental affair.

  In the end, the weekend was a mixture of this overwhelming emotion and the culmination of four intense years for our middle child. Not many kids his age had to struggle with the hardship of losing a parent while staying on course to get a well-earned degree in a complex subject. Mixed in with the sadness of Amy’s absence were moments of pure joy and pride as I watched my son receive his diploma in his cap and gown.

  Miles’s graduation was difficult in so many ways, but it wasn’t until it was over that the bottom really dropped out. That was when I started having panic attacks.

  I would have random periods in the day when my heart started to beat in a forceful way that caused me to struggle to catch my breath. The first time it happened, I thought it was something physical, as in a cardiac issue. I do not have a specific memory of an exact trigger that brought on this feeling, but I mention it because after a major loss you have to expect the unexpected, both physically and emotionally. So much of this new life was a presentation of unexpected experiences and challenges. There was a gap in my heart, in my bed, and in my thoughts.

  When it started to occur more frequently, never at the same time of day, I talked to my therapist about it. I remember clearly sitting on her couch and having the feeling come up in her office. By then, I thought I was having some anxiety. I wondered if this was a normal reaction to grief. She assured me that many emotional responses manifest themselves in physical characteristics. She did, however, encourage me to see my doctor.

  And that’s how I found myself in my doctor’s office on May 11, 2017, taking a stress test. Be careful what you say to your doctor. He had no choice but to order the test. I got wired up and did my turn on the treadmill. I passed with flying colors. The mere comfort of knowing I was not having a heart attack surely made the symptoms recede. I did not have another incident.

  Still, the episode lingered in its own way. It marked the first time I truly understood just how complicated and profound the layers surrounding loss can be, not just our internal responses but our bodies’ behaviors as well. This revelation was an incredibly powerful one: loss has emotional and physical components that one has no control over. To successfully navigate this new landscape, I would have to understand that—the sooner, the better.

  12

  Refueling Mind and Body

  Life is strange. You keep moving and keep moving. Before you know it, you look back and think, “What was that?”

  —Joe Rogan

  The panic attacks were eye-opening on so many levels, and perhaps chief among them was the realization that before I could do anything else with my life, I had to start taking better care of myself.

  For the two years I was taking care of Amy, and for months after she died, I wasn’t taking care of myself. I thought I was, but in truth, I’d lost a lot of weight, stopped exercising, and generally wasn’t caring for myself. Health, wellness, nutrition, and exercise had been major priorities for Amy and me throughout our marriage, and we passed those priorities along to our children.

  It’s never been in me to sit back with
my feet up and wait for things to happen. It’s my nature to be active, to be a participant and appreciate that I have been born into a certain privilege in this world, but also that I have to earn my place in it. Almost to try to reconnect with that man Amy married, the man I’d lost track of, I did what she would have done and made a list of the jobs I’d gone out and found from the time I was a boy:

  Age 8—Newspaper route

  Age 11—Neighborhood hardware store

  Age 13—Neighborhood pharmacy

  High school—Health club/photography business entrepreneur/production assistant/movie theater/law office clerk

  College—Short-order cook/window washer/assistant to member of Parliament

  Law school—Bartender/law clerk

  I was ready to dive back into being a participant again.

  Starting therapy had been a crucial first step.

  Then, knowing perfectly well from many years of experience that yoga makes differences that only start with the body, I headed to a yoga studio near my house, where I took up a method of exercise called “sculpt.” It’s a combination of weights, yoga, and cardio, and I was drawn to it because of its intensity and its connection to yoga. I had heard how difficult the classes were, and wanted to try it out. The workout was like nothing I had ever experienced—super intense, very sweaty, and, with the right teacher, a very inspiring hour and a half.

  Amy, by the way, would have hated it, not because of the intensity of the workout but because she HATED group exercise. That is why we did ashtanga yoga for many years—it has a set series of poses that never change no matter where you are in the world, and it can be done in private or a group setting. If I was to do a spinning class, or any other group class, she would encourage me. But the beat of loud music, all of it, made her cringe; and the mere suggestion from the teacher to “Keep it up, you can do it!” or “You are strong, you can do anything if you put your mind to it!” made her absolutely crazy.

  In this case, the sculpt instructor was a lovely soul I connected with because of her spiritual approach to our sessions. She talked a lot about “setting an intention” to the practice. I’d heard that before, more than once, and always thought, “Yeah, my intention is to work my butt off and get a good sweat.” “Setting an intention” sounded a little woo-woo to me, and I found it difficult to resonate with. But now I found myself interpreting “setting an intention” in a whole new way, something along the lines of “Embrace this new life,” or “Think more about love and less about anger over my loss.” An intention can range from being grateful or feeling peaceful to something more physical, such as focusing on breath or working through an injury. Typically, the teacher asks us to set an intention at the beginning of the class and refer back to it at the end in some capacity. The intention I would set varied from day to day. Sometimes I literally could not embrace the concept, and on other days I felt so connected to it. As I made this rigorous practice more of my regular routine, I warmed up to the intention-setting concept as a spiritual connection to the physical work.

  It helped. A lot. So much so that before long I started incorporating Pilates and functional physical fitness into my normal routine. The physical challenge was intense and felt wonderful. The emotional self-connection and release felt even better.

  I’d done some meditation before, and I’m sure there will be some eye-rolling out there by some of you who read this and think I’m wandering into fad territory; but the truth is that taking up the daily practice of meditating has changed my life. I’d already done some reading about thought leaders, successful business owners, and fitness gurus extolling the benefits of meditation. When I committed to making a habit of it on my own, I read more about the neuroscientific advantages, and about different teachers and practitioners, and meditating went from being kind of a cool thing to do to being a logical, vital, healing thing to do. Before long, and to this day, the simple act of sitting still for ten minutes every morning has opened my eyes to being mindful of my internal and external worlds.

  I wasn’t drawn to the idea of a therapeutic group setting to help me through losing Amy. Something about it felt forced to me. Don’t get me wrong; I am well aware that group therapy has proven extremely rewarding and successful to many people who experience profound loss. I am an introvert by nature, however, and I just felt like my process could come more effectively from individual therapy and from my network of family and friends.

  Within the first few weeks of Amy’s death, a dear friend introduced me to Sheryl Sandberg, with whom she had been working on a project. In the course of their conversations, Amy’s article came up, and of course Sheryl had read it. I have to plead ignorance here—I did not know much about Sheryl. Looking back now, that seems crazy. I was vaguely familiar with her story of loss but had to refresh my memory. Soon she sent me an advanced copy of a book she’d written with Adam Grant that was about to be published, a book called Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. It became a kind of guidebook for me; so many of the stories contained in it resonated deeply. While our versions of loss—sudden vs. slow onset—were very different, I immediately felt a real kismet with her. Seeing my new experiences in print, as part of a shared story, was so comforting. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to her, and since then I have modeled the generous behavior she showed me with others in my life who have faced unbearable loss.

  Gradually, as my radar went up again and other people’s stories came into my awareness, I began to dip into the lives of other widowers and those who experienced profound loss as I had. Digesting these incredible stories made me feel like I was developing my own version of a grief group. Snippets of other people’s experiences of loss connected with me deeply. There was also something comforting in not having to engage with someone in intimate conversation but instead being able to process the connection in my own way. It was part of my “work,” and ultimately encouraged me to tell my own story. It turns out that even though everyone experiences loss differently, there’s enormous comfort and hope in learning how other widows and widowers (Isn’t that the oddest word, by the way? It kind of sounds like “one who widows”) got through the inevitable painful darkness, and that they got through it.

  Because it is now an ingrained Rosenthal trait, here’s a list of the books I strongly recommend if you’re struggling through this journey yourself:

  Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant

  The Widower’s Notebook, by Jonathan Santlofer

  The Light of the World, by Elizabeth Alexander

  When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi

  The Iceberg, by Marion Coutts

  Young Widower, by John W. Evans

  Living with the End in Mind, by Erin Tierney Kramp and Douglas H. Kramp

  In a Dark Wood, by Joseph Luzzi

  You Are Not Alone: A Heartfelt Guide for Grief, Healing, and Hope, by Debbie Augenthaler

  Gratitude, by Oliver Sacks

  The Art of Losing, by Kevin Young

  What to Do When I’m Gone: A Mother’s Wisdom to Her Daughter, by Suzy Hopkins and Hallie Bateman

  The Five Innovations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us about Living Fully, by Frank Ostaseski

  The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, by Nina Riggs

  The Missing Piece, by Shel Silverstein

  This Is a Poem That Heals Fish, by Jean-Pierre Siméon

  Cry, Heart, but Never Break, by Glenn Ringtved

  Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, by Michael Rosen

  Of course, reading, helpful as it was, would get me only so far. Learning how others have struggled with grief was powerful and poignant, but it also reminded me that learning was only one piece of this story. The time I was spending on myself was hugely important—I felt my energy returning slowly but surely, I spent less time in bed—and these changes opened up more emotional space for me to begin thinking more concretely about my new life and how I was going to fil
l that proverbial blank space.

  The panic attacks were scary, difficult to overcome in so many ways, but in their aftermath, I began to emerge the better for them. Week by week, I began to feel like I would be able to get through this—something that I hadn’t been sure of just a month earlier.

  But the further I crawled out, the more questions began to flood in. The immense sense of loss and sadness that I felt in the wake of Amy’s death was debilitating, but it was also liberating in a way; I felt no pressure, no need to think about any other part of myself than grief. As I stepped tentatively back into the world, suddenly I had questions to answer, decisions to make. Not just about immediate issues like what to have for dinner, what shirt to wear, but big-picture stuff—about not only my present but my future as well.

  And in those moments I found myself thinking more and more about that blank space at the end of Amy’s New York Times essay and accepting it as a gift, an unrestricted endowment from her, not just her permission but her blessing to fill it with new chapters of my life.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when, just as I thought I had the beginnings of my plan figured out, life intervened.

  13

  Navigating a Maze of Emotions

  One day we’ll all be ghosts

  Tripping around in someone else’s home.

  One day we’ll all be ghosts, ghosts, ghosts,