I remember a time when everything seemed hunky dory one minute and then life happened and all of the sudden it wasn’t anymore.

I was thirty years old. I worked at Ketchum Advertising in what I’d have called my dream job back then, kicking it with the bigwigs when I was just a very small wig. Feeling all glamorous and important every time I stood up in front of a room to speak my words of advertising brilliance.

I was in my boss’s corner office with big floor to ceiling windows early in the morning on a sunny day seated on the couch having a not-so-glamorous talk about some business we lost and jobs that might be affected and that felt like the worst thing in the world that could be happening on that day but then Sue, my boss’s tiny secretary with the blonde pageboy and sensible shoes tapped lightly on the closed door and said there was a call for me. She read my face in seconds, knowing I was annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of that particular no-good very bad meeting and she said, “It’s about your husband. You better take it.” My boss, Jim, looked at me with his stern thin face with black bushy eyebrows all askew and said, “Hit it, kiddo. We’ll pick it up later.” And I was still annoyed but I took that call.

Five days later I was no longer a young professional married woman with vague plans for starting to try for a baby, the social center of a lovely group of what Bridget Jones would have referred to as Smug Marrieds, a planner and a doer and a mover. I was a widow. My husband, who I’d barely gotten a chance to get used to living with, had died three weeks before our third anniversary. He was here. And then he was there, in intensive care unit 11F at UPMC Presbyterian hospital with garish looking staples in his smooth bald head with the beautiful green eyes with fringey eyelashes clamped tightly shut. And then he was gone.

We were gone. My marriage? Gone. Smug marrieds? Still there but somehow different. Job? Still there but going into dark times of its own (that boss I referred to above was about to lead our agency through a painful holding company acquisition which wasn’t half as painful as it was when he got leukemia and died at the age of 41). Friends and family were all there. All the same. I was blessed with such support! I was in the center of a web of love that I couldn’t have imagined before this terrible terrible thing happened to me. I was surrounded. Bathed in it. Calls. Letters. Cards. Visits. The most thoughtful little gifts from my ridiculously talented artsy friends. I was in a dark place but somehow light got in. A tiny bit of light – a little more each day. I didn’t even notice it, that light, at the time. But it was there in the midst of a nuclear bomb that had just gone off in the middle of my perfectly planned little married life.

It wasn’t always so easy to see that light though.

Suddenly I was othered in a way I could never have imagined before it happened to me. I was a freak. The thing people dreaded. The walking reminder that this, all of this, could be gone in a hot second before you even realized what happened. I’d walk into rooms, when I finally got to the point where such a thing seemed possible again, and the looks on the faces in that room withered. Tears formed in shining eyes. Occasionally, I’m not even exaggerating, people would gasp. THERE SHE IS. Tragedy in the form of a thing so wrong it felt perverse – a 30 year old widow. Part of a pair that was now more like that one left over slipper that sticks halfway out from under your bed, completely useless without its mate but you don’t throw it away because maybe you’ll find it someday.

I went from being the life of the Smug Married party to being the life of my own tawdry party of one. I would sit in the living rooms I’d sat in just months before as part of a couple, watching our beloved Friday night episode of The X-Files and everything looked almost just the same. Same girlfriends in the kitchen laughing too loud. Same husbands sprawled on various comfy pieces of furniture in the glow from the television screen. Same babies asleep in cribs upstairs while the parents got their drink on downstairs.

Then there was me. I also looked very much the same. Same face. Same name. Same life really but it wasn’t the same at all.

Suddenly, only about twenty percent of the conversations felt like they were for me. For people like me, I mean, who had been one thing not so long ago but now was something entirely different, not unlike the things Mulder and Scully tried to capture, those alien creatures that looked like humans but had black oil in their eyes. I still went to the gatherings. I did for years and years. But eventually, my alien lifestyle didn’t work with theirs anymore. Then a rift over a death-related snub from my former in-laws that my married friends tried to keep from me caused me to pretty much walk away and never look back. Like a snake shedding its skin. I felt like something new but also entirely different. Something the same but more than a little off. Too shiny maybe. Too new.

Where does a strangely shiny new 30-year-old widow go looking when she finds herself an alien among her old tribe?

Well. To bars of course. To lots and lots of bars accompanied by new friends who were attracted to my shiny veneer like moths. Because I was fun. I was a lot of fun. I was running as fast as I could both away from an old life a toward something new and that’s a fun race to be a part of. My twenty-something friends seemed to get me. They had lives like mine without kids, without Friday nights in with beers and television shows as babies slept upstairs. They could stay out late on any night of any week. They could see who they wanted to see and do who they wanted to do and nobody much cared. I mean, that’s what your twenties are supposed to be about right? There was always a happy hour. Always a party. Always a bartender who wanted to do more than make me fancy cocktails. For years, far too many years, I went with this flow and it felt freaking good. I mean, it seemed like it felt good?

But here’s the thing. I wasn’t in my twenties. I was in my mid-to-late thirties by that time. I was just like them until something came up and the black oil showed through in my eyes. I made more money than they did. I had more freedom. I had a house and a fancy car and fancier clothes. I could afford to be as fabulous as I wanted to be, but underneath all of the fancy clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue was a 30-something afraid that she was probably getting too old to consider having those babies she always assumed she’d have. Underneath all of the shiny, there was a great big black hole full of emptiness that none of them could fill no matter how hard they tried to keep up. I went through best friends like fast fashion. I always felt sad when one moved on but there was always another one coming right up behind her.

The thing is, empty can only be ignored for so long before it tries to swallow you whole. It had to end. I had to grow up. I had to figure out how to be happy alone. Truly happy. Time spent alone with books and pens on lined paper of spiral bound notebooks. Quiet nights alone. Very many quiet nights alone. Contentment. A place I finally did seem to fit. Inside of my own heart. Inside of a different new house. Inside the broken husk that used to be 30-year-old bright shiny full-of-hope me. Little by little, I found a way to refill what was empty. But that’s the thing, isn’t it?

Little. By. Little.

I’m tempted to roll across the room to the cabinet that contains all of my old journals and find the book that tells the story of 35 or 36 year old me. I almost don’t have to do it because I pretty much know what I would find. I’d find pain. A lot of sadness. A girl who couldn’t seem to let go of the one great love who just simply stopped loving her back. A girl who hated the skin she lived in even though it was covered in Versace and Chanel. A girl who almost never felt ok even though she looked like she was having the time of her damn life. A girl who ached to be loved and understood but made every decision possible to prevent that from actually happening. Five or six years into my suddenly alien life, life wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t pretty at all.

And here I am again. Five or six years into this newalien life trying to figure out why I’m so empty inside when surrounded by love and goodness. Just like that other time. Almost exactly like it so much it hit me today like a wrecking ball to my skull.

You talk to me about your day – the errands you ran, the hair appointment you had, the frustrations with your kids, the relaxing trip to the beach you’re dying to take, the weekend away at a spa just to do something, anything that isn’t this pandemic sheltering in place thing. I nod my head and laugh and oooh and ahh and try to say funny stuff (just like before) but none of it means anything to me. At this place where I am in this new life I have, none of those things feels remotely familiar to me. What are you doing this weekend, Beth? Um. Well. Yeah.

I find myself othered again completely against my will. I don’t enjoy it even a little bit.

My haircuts happen in my bathroom. My entertainment comes via too many giant screen TVs and my relaxation happens in a lift chair because I can’t figure out how to be comfortable in bed. Who wants to talk about that? Who wants to talk about the suddenly dead formerly healthy as a horse 30-year-old husband? Nobody wants to talk about those things. Or maybe you do. Maybe you do want to listen to me as I sob about my utter emptiness or my sadness watching my car drive away without me never to come back or how I still can’t take a fucking shower by myself. Maybe you DO want to talk about all of it because you’re a true friend. A really good fucking person. You really care and you know that shitty things happen to good people and it sucks so you are that friend. That sister. That person who wants to be there.

The thing is? I don’t want to be there. I don’t want to hear my own words coming from my own mouth. I talk about work because it’s the one quasi- normal thing I have going on in this life right now and if you had any idea what is actually happening at work in this weird pandemic-lite environment, like say if you happen to work with me, the fact that I just called work “normal” is likely freaking you the hell out. Because that shit ain’t normal but I thank the Universe for my job every day because without it I’m not even sure what I’d be right now. I don’t know what to do with the hours I am conscious in a day. I’m trying to teach myself the power of positive thinking and daily affirmations and a new focus on therapy. I’m doing all of the things. And here I am. Watching my car drive away without me in it. Looking at an empty garage from the vantage point of the wheelchair I am fortunate enough to have in a house that accommodates it and me as well as any place ever could. And I struggle to find gratitude. I reach for grace and it slips through my fingers. It laughs at me from the bed I can’t quite figure out how to sleep in.

Then I remember 35 and 36. I remember that depth of loss and that desperation for good and how impossible it seemed. It seemed utterly impossible. It took decades for me to work it out. Decades. Two of them in fact. And I remind myself that five or six years into a trauma like this whole supersonic speed MS disability progression might as well be five or six minutes. I know this. I’ve been here before. I wrote about it then, too, I just didn’t let anyone read it (thank sweet baby Jesus for small favors).

I know what this is. And I know the only way out is through. And the occasional miracle like the I-Love-You cookies my four year old niece and her mom delivered to my house on that first Valentine’s Day after Chuck died and how we danced in my living room – me in my week old smelly pajamas and my little niece with ringlets in her hair and a giggle that sounded like music. Or a more recent miracle when the same sister figured out a way for me to go get a pedicure and not one thing went wrong and I actually felt myself relax and forget about worrying about if and when I might have to attempt to use a public bathroom.

The little miracles are going to happen.

I have to make myself remember that. I’ve been here before. I know what this is like. I know I’m in the thick of it when it feels like everything has gone sour and nothing will ever be good again. I have to try harder to remember that this life, this stuff that happens when you’re just happily bopping along thinking you know what’s coming, this stuff won’t be ignored. It won’t be trifled with. It will have its pound of flesh and buckets and buckets of tears. Those things aren’t optional.

And somehow, somehow things are someday ok again. I hope I’m not too old to enjoy it when it actually happens this time.

Author’s note: I know I’ve written versions of this post over and over and over again. I apologize for the redundancy. It seems to be the only thing that helps me when I go this dark. Thanks for indulging me, dear reader.