Hopeful. That’s the tone she wanted to strike. There was no way, she figured, that her strong, good-natured Sergio had been taken down by this thing. He had to be somewhere. They just didn’t know where.
But a week went by and hundreds of posters were taped onto streetlights, fences, and subway station walls all over the five boroughs, and still there was no sign of him. The news reports were grim—there had been many survivors and many dead, but very few injured. Tanya continued to hold on to hope, continued to send out optimistic emails. On September 17, Tanya wrote:So here it is, another day, and though it really is hard to face each new one, we are all hanging in there—it’s all that we can do for Sergio and the others. I am trying to look at it as another day closer to finding him.
And then another week went by. The news reports grew even more grim—the rescue crews were finding very few people still alive. The scene was more accurately described as a recovery effort. “Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss,” memoirist Gail Caldwell writes, “and yet without it we couldn’t survive.” On October 2, Tanya wrote: Today I cleaned my floors, put on some good music, opened the windows and welcomed the beautiful sunny day here. I will finish this e-mail, do some laundry, and take care of paperwork for the store. Then perhaps I’ll take a walk in the garden, throw on Oprah or a good video, or just take a long nap. And all the while, as has been the case for the past three weeks, I will wait for news, and believe it or not, I am still hoping for a miracle . . .
She heard that someone had once been trapped in the rubble of an earthquake, alive, for twenty-eight days. The number twenty-eight stuck in her mind. She clung with a fierce desperation to the possibility that Sergio could be alive. “Twenty-eight days,” she told people. “It’s happened before. It could happen again.”
Yet as the twenty-eighth day was approaching, her hope was running out. She felt like she was going crazy. “Did Sergio and I even exist?” she wondered, sleep deprived and in shock.
Then, as soon as she doubted their love, she would see some sign that confirmed it. Sergio and Tanya had always had a thing for bunnies. They sent each other cards with bunnies on them, called each other bunny, even referred to their impending postwedding bliss as the “bunnymoon.” In the weeks that she waited for Sergio to come home, she saw bunnies everywhere—on the side of a truck, bustling through Jackson Heights, on a candy wrapper, on a magic show on television.
What, Tanya wondered, was the meaning of these synchronous moments? Were these real signs that Sergio was alive somewhere and just needed to be found and brought home? Or was he communicating from another realm?
On the twenty-sixth day, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She decided that she had to call a psychic in Florida that a friend had told her about, a woman named Elaine, who was supposed to have a direct line to the spiritual realm beyond. Tanya remembered the discussion she’d had with Sergio about channeling—so many years ago in that messy, blissful bed—as she dialed Elaine’s number on the evening of October 7.
After a quick introduction—nothing more than names, niceties, and Tanya’s birth date—Elaine launched in: “You are being stripped of everything you know, so that you can come into your own power.” Then she paused, her voice dropped, and she said softly, “Oh dear. You’ve lost someone. Your soul mate.” The last stubborn bit of hope left Tanya’s body with her next exhalation.
Though it had been nearly a year since Sergio’s death, Tanya still held on to his favorite cereal: Honey Bunches of Oats. She felt great comfort in touching the box, knowing that Sergio’s hands had once touched it as well. She knew it was crazy, but she was too sad to care much about crazy. She says, “One of my fears is that, as time passes, I’m going to forget. And then I go to my boxes. I saved everything.”
It wasn’t just the cereal boxes. It was the chocolate drawer (Sergio had a real sweet tooth). And the clothes. Sometimes Tanya would stand at the closet and gently finger Sergio’s soccer jerseys, thinking of how much he loved the sport and when she would scream “Goal!” Even his bric-a-brac—old receipts, batteries, and loose coins—became sacred talismans to Tanya. She would rub each item and wonder when he’d set it aside. It amazed her that these things, which had once seemed so mundane, were now sources of longing for her, sacred almost. If only she could see him empty out his pockets one more time, his big hands diving in and coming out with a strange little assortment of things. That one silly action would be so wildly comforting.
Yet he would never do that again. He would never wash his hands with his favorite sandalwood soap or whistle through his teeth. He would never eat another slice of pizza at Old Palermos or make a glass of his signature “Sergio Sangria”—red wine with Fresca. He would never get his hair cut at Jimmy the Greek’s. He would never refer to himself in the third person. Worst of all, he would never touch her again. “I just want him to come home,” Tanya said. “I feel like life is so fake.”
The outside world was jarring. People wanted to make small talk about the weather. Tanya was expected to go grocery shopping and do her laundry and keep the store running. Sometimes it made her feel like screaming, as Al Pacino so famously had in Scent of a Woman, “I’m in the dark here!” All that was authentic to her, internally, was lost and yet the world went on, bustling along with its Pollyanna brightness, expecting her to live as if living wasn’t a dangerous and sad thing to do. The incongruence made her feel alienated from other people and numb to the world.
Even a trip to France with her mother, a vacation she’d once dreamed of, left her feeling empty. Looking out over the fields of dancing lavender, a sight she had anticipated all her life, she experienced nothing, as if her heart were responding with a blank buzz to something so beautiful.
Perhaps even worse than the blank buzz was the gut shot of envy. One of Sergio’s old cop buddies called with elation in his voice and told her that he’d had a son and named him after Sergio. Tanya tried to sound joyful in her response, but the words stuck in her throat. She would never have a baby with Sergio. She would never hear him call someone, his big hazel eyes wide with disbelief and joy, and tell them that he was a daddy. She admits, “It’s so yucky, the feelings of envy and self-pity.”
These are the kinds of feelings that she is able to share with her support group of widows, knowing they will understand. She doesn’t want to sound bitter or ungenerous. But when girlfriends hold their lefts hands out to her, revealing the promise of “till death do us part” sparkling on their fingers, she has to repress the sharp pang of injustice and say, “How exciting!” as if she means it, as if she could possibly mean it when her own love story was cut short.
It was Herculean just to mourn Sergio, just to come to terms with the loss of such a gorgeous bear of a man, her “Big Daddy,” her true love. But she also had to mourn their future together. As Carmella B’Hahn, author of Mourning Has Broken, explains, “Our stories of how life might unfold, although invisible, are often as powerful and real to us as the actual present moment . . . the more vivid our imaginings of the future, the greater the loss will be felt.”
Tanya reflects, “What I lost was tremendous. It wasn’t just losing the love of my life. It was losing my expectations, my dreams, my future, what I thought would be my future.”
Tanya remembers a dusk stroll with Sergio in their neighborhood in Queens. They spotted an old couple, wrinkled hands intertwined, and Sergio leaned over to her and said, “That’s going to be you and me one day, babe.”
Remembering this moment is deeply painful, like a broken promise. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Marilynne Robinson writes:There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having m
eant to keep us waiting long.
Tanya treasures the little signs she gets from beyond, the small ways in which she feels like Sergio is reaching back, reassuring her that he is still with her, but she also finds them cruel. She explains, “At moments when I’m really having a lot of despair, I feel that it’s such a blessing that I can get these things, but at the same time, it’s like ‘Why can’t you just come home?’ Instead of conjuring up bunnies, conjure up flesh and bone and come home.”
Sergio will not come home. He can’t. The finality of it is enough to make Tanya long for her own end. “What keeps me going right now,” she explains, in late 2002, “is remembering him, of course, and remembering that I am capable of a tremendous amount of love and joy . . . and guilt.” Tanya pauses and dives down to the depths of her own suffering, then continues: “Guilt keeps me here. All of my friends and family keep me here. Because, believe me, sometimes the pain is so much that I don’t want to be.”
New York is simply too full of triggers—every little thing in the apartment, the never-ending mail about recovery logistics and therapeutic opportunities from city agencies, Sergio’s favorite corner store, the skyline’s altered state. Tanya feels as if the city is conspiring to keep her in the dark.
So she escapes. Or more accurately, she returns to the place where she and Sergio first fell in love. Tanya buys an apartment in Miami in October of 2002. It is a place of only happy, buoyant memories, and otherwise, a sort of comforting anonymity. In New York, Tanya is the widow. In Miami, she can be the biker chick, the new age mystic, the beautiful, mysterious woman at the bar.
The bike gives her a healing outlet. Tanya explains: “I go to Miami and get on my motorcycle. It’s euphoric. There’s something about sunshine, wind in the hair, road, just vastness, nature, trees, that I find soothing. You go into such a zone. You become kind of one with the road. You let everything go. Free.”
Tanya’s not just liberated when on her bike; she’s a badass: “I feel strong when I’m on the bike, like I’m the shit. I got this 468-pound machine and I’m controlling it.” At a time when the sadness makes her feel weak and vulnerable, getting on the bike brings her back to her own undeniable strength.
As early as 2003, Tanya admits, “I have this fantasy that I’m going to get this whole new life someday.” She says this almost as if she were wishing to fly with her own two arms as wings, as if it is both a delicious and preposterous idea to her. Sergio, after all, was the love of her life. After losing him, there was a time when she felt as if she had lost her own one-and-only possible future, lost the opportunity to ever have a family, lost the capacity to love ever again. But the longer she is in Miami, riding her bike fast on the highways overlooking the ocean, meeting people who have never known her as Sergio’s girl, letting time and quiet oxidize some of her acute pain away, she begins to let the possibility of a new life creep in.
One of the silver linings, however inadequate, of losing Sergio was a financial cushion. Though Tanya continued to run her store, Inner Peace, returning to Queens and all its triggers at least every couple of weeks, she was no longer totally dependent on the store revenue because of the money she received from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund following Sergio’s death.
While the money helps Tanya make ends meet, she also spots an opportunity to finally give back to her mother, Eileen. Her mom adopted her, raised her and her three children while working two jobs, took care of her sick husband until his death, as well as taking care of friends and neighbors, and never complained. In 2004 and 2005, Tanya spends a lot of time and energy on purchasing and remodeling an apartment for Eileen, just ten blocks away from her own, in Miami. She makes sure that every last detail reflects her mother’s tastes, needs, and unspoken desires.
It is an all-consuming project, taking her mind away from her mourning for hours at a time, providing her with the healing sensation of giving back rather than being stuck in her own funk. It’s not that Tanya is done mourning, but that she is learning how to take breaks from it. Tanya describes this dynamic: “There’s the half of me that’s like I have to connect [to my grief], I have to be in it, but at the same time, I don’t want to overwhelm myself. I want to be connected, but not to the point where it’s choking me. I need to divert. I need to decompress.”
Tanya’s instinctual wisdom is mirrored in scientific research. Dr. George Bonanno, who has studied thousands of people in mourning, writes, “It is that respite from the trench of sadness that makes grief bearable. It is the marvelous human capacity to squeeze in brief moments of happiness and joy that allows us to see that we may once again begin moving forward.”
Moving back and forth between Miami and New York isn’t easy. Each time that Tanya returns to her and Sergio’s apartment in Queens, she is confronted with a mountain of mail pertaining to 9/11, voice mail messages, all of the little logistics of the store. The reality of her loss sometimes stuns her all over again, the minute she walks through that apartment door.
She is essentially living a double life, but she gives herself permission. She knows that she needs it. When things get hard, she tells herself, “That chapter is finished, at least for this lifetime. Stay open. It will come. Get on your bike. Get through the days. Do what you have to do.”
Tanya rolls into a gas station on “Big Daddy” with her friend Debbie clinging to her back. They spot a group of guys on souped-up motorcycles. These guys are the real deal and Debbie jumps at the chance to spark a conversation: “It’s hot, right? Two girls on a bike.”
The two groups end up chatting for a bit. Tanya mentions wanting to repaint the tank of her bike to honor her lost fiancé. She feels awkward inserting Sergio into conversations like these, but also obligated. The guilt she feels is ever present, particularly on days like these when she is deliberately leaving her widow identity behind and just trying to have some fun. She is comforted when she notices that one handsome guy’s Harley Deuce has a firefighterangel emblem on his license plate. He probably gets it, she thinks.
The girls decide to join the guys as they ride toward Fort Lauderdale. It is a carefree day, just the kind that gives Tanya great relief. But eventually it’s time to head home. The looker on the Harley Deuce, who Tanya learns is named Ray, offers to ride south with her.
Once they make it home, Tanya accepts Ray’s invitation for lunch along Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road. She has already started dating, but she struggles with how to talk with new guys about who she is and what she has experienced. Though Tanya’s support group ended in 2004, the women all stay in touch and often discuss the difficulty of simply introducing themselves when meeting new people. With Ray, it all just comes pouring out. He responds with palpable empathy: “I can tell that you really loved him.”
The simplicity of it is stunning. “I did,” Tanya replies. “I really did.”
Having been through her own season of suffering, Tanya notices that she is able to connect more deeply to the suffering of others. “Losing Sergio was the experience that was my reality call,” she explains. “We all have this assumption: You do good things, good things happen. That’s how we’re all conditioned to live until the rug gets taken out from under you and you realize, wow, there’s pain in life.”
Tanya has come to understand that pain is nondiscriminating, that the nearly unbearable level of loss she’s weathered is not unique. Philosopher Judith Butler writes, “To grieve . . . is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself.”
“Why me?” Tanya asks, but then follows: “Why not me? What makes me so special that I shouldn’t be going through this? If this is for my soul’s growth, let me try to be as productive as I can be.”
In 2005, she decides to take a trip to South America, during which she spends a transformative week volunteering at the village of San Pedro de Casta in the Andes. The poor village lies near the ancient Inca ruins of Marcahuasi, four hours from the city o
f Lima. The secluded farming community that Tanya finds there holds deep ties to the once flourishing empire, and yet now the villagers struggle to get basic necessities like running water and proper housing with ventilation. Tanya is shocked to learn about the high infant mortality rate, due mostly to carbon monoxide poisoning. She doesn’t hesitate to get her hands dirty to help.
Marcahuasi, a mysterious site in Peru peppered with hundreds of gigantic stone sculptures, is believed by many to be one of the world’s most spiritual places, and Tanya, ever open, feels a deep connection to the people and the land there. She teaches English to the village children.
Faced with the undeniable extent of the village children’s hardship, Tanya realized that she had been living life with blinders on, preoccupied with wedding planning, and inventory for the store, and soccer games. She and Sergio had been happy-go-lucky. They were also, Tanya realizes, sometimes disconnected to the misfortune of others: “I don’t ever want to get to the point where I am that oblivious to the world as I was before September 11th. This is what pain is, and people encounter this everywhere.”
Roman Catholic monk Thomas Merton observed, “There is in all visible things . . . a hidden wholeness.” Tanya stood atop Machu Picchu, looking out at the breathtaking vista before her, and felt that hidden wholeness for the first time in years. It was her thirty-seventh birthday and she’d grown tired of the divided life. She’d come to Peru in search of some kind of wisdom about how to move forward, how to fuse her cleaved worlds together, and here, at eight thousand feet up, she’d actually gotten something like an answer.
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