When I first met Peter 12 summers ago, he was one of four people in a dive bar in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. He wore board shorts and flip-flops and smelled like Parliament cigarettes. He was wearing a green T-shirt that read “Thanks for looking at my shirt instead of my erection,” in white block text. I was disgusted by the T-shirt, but his irreverence sparked my curiosity.
I was on a brief vacation from an impossible situation. I had recently moved back home to D.C., where my mother was dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. I was helping my dad care for her. Since ALS is a terminal illness, we researched alternative treatments and shuttled her to appointments like lab rats in an experiment searching for an exit where none existed. We watched together as she slowly lost the ability to speak, swallow, and eventually breathe.
I stared at the tattoos that poked out from the edges of Peter’s sleeves. He said he hated it when people asked him the significance of each tattoo. All I could hear was the way he pronounced my name in his Irish accent. I asked anyway.
“Every old man I see reminds me of my father,” Peter translated from Gaelic to English a poem by Patrick Kavanagh tattooed on his right arm. Peter had the answers I would soon need about how to survive the death of someone you love. His dad had died a year prior from pancreatic cancer, and his brother died by suicide just days before Peter’s 18th birthday legally allowed him a pint at the local pub.
Within hours of meeting, I shared details with him that I had not shared with anyone else. And although he was a stranger, home quickly became wherever he was.
Against all logic, when my mother died four months later, the only person I wanted to tell about the pain of her sickness and death was the Irish guy I’d met at a bar in San Juan del Sur. Peter became my long-distance boyfriend, and when I brought him my sadness, he never changed the conversation or tried to escape. He just listened.
A year and a half after my mother died, my father was diagnosed with cancer. Dad survived the first round of chemotherapy. But the cancer returned less than two years after remission. Within months, he was in the emergency room. Peter spent as much time at the hospital as I did. After almost two weeks in the ICU, my father died the very night he seemed to stabilize.
Peter and I married months later, and we left the East Coast for the California sunshine in my dad’s green Jeep that I inherited. “Mom and Dad are coming with us!” I joked to Peter as my parent’s ashes sat perched between the two front seats.
It was a strange arrangement for newlyweds, but Peter never questioned it. We slowly made our way, stopping in Roanoke, Nashville, Oklahoma City, the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, and Santa Fe, and Mom and Dad were there, too. They stayed in La Quinta hotels, ate Subway, listened to live music, and had beers at dive bars.
So many people told me I was lucky to have love at such a hard time. We are told a lot of things about love. We are told that it can heal anything. As we drove across the country, I wanted to believe that myth. I wanted a new start and to outrun grief.
When my mother died, the pain was enormous, but so was my hope that my life could only improve with increasing space from illness and death and more room to give our relationship a chance. Who knows what would have happened to me and my grief for my mother if that had been my only loss? All I know is that when my father died, the wheels came off.
I’d hoped that somehow my grief would remain invisible, undetectable, and wouldn’t interfere with our new life together. But like the ashes between us on the road trip, my grief followed us everywhere we went.
Throughout our trip, I obsessed over the ashes. I checked in on them often, like a plant or a pet, to assure myself they were okay. They were the first pieces of luggage that I brought into our room wherever we stayed, fearing they could get lost or stolen. When we got across the country, my grief took up all the room in our apartment.
And so despite my love for Peter, he was often on the receiving end of my anger. I snapped at him when he forgot something at the store or forgot to put new toilet paper on the roll. I rode him about prompt email responses, our taxes, or leaving the gas tank empty.
I snapped and we fought, and we repeated that cycle until we couldn’t anymore. In the year or two following my father’s death, we hurt each other so much that we would spend the following years detangling it.
I hated who had I become, so I assumed Peter felt the same. I tried to be “normal” because I thought that was the version of me Peter wanted. He never requested that of me. But I assumed it when he named my anxiety or showed frustration when I didn’t want to leave the apartment again.
Since all my emotional chips were on Peter, I feared losing him, too, in a million different ways. I cried when he couldn’t quit smoking, convinced cigarettes would kill him. I worried that he couldn’t endure living with my grief forever. Despite my fears, he never wavered in his loyalty to me.
“I can’t carry the weight of your sadness anymore,” Peter said one day in our San Francisco apartment. Although he had told me this multiple times before, it was the first time the words sunk in. I’m not sure why I heard Peter that day. Perhaps it was that enough time had passed since my parents’ deaths, or maybe it was the sadness in his eyes.
I loved Peter so much that I wanted to believe that alone was enough to take away the sadness of losing my parents, but it couldn’t—I’m not sure any love can. Only I could heal my grief, and I finally understood that I needed to begin to learn how.
That conversation was the start of sloth-speed change in our relationship. There was never a switch that flipped, as much as I searched for it—we just kept trying. We went to couples therapy. We moved out of the city. I left a job I hated. I started therapy on my own. We did couples therapy again. I journaled. I cried. I found a new therapist again. I ran countless miles. I drank too many glasses of wine. I screamed into my pillow. I meditated. I grieved.
And in that mourning, I found pieces of a new version of myself that I loved, and I made tiny steps back to Peter.
Our relationship in many ways looks like it did years ago. We still share our grief, but it is not the only thing we share—I know that it never was. We speak to each other with honesty and with vulnerability. We still go to the gym together, enjoy outdoors concerts, and tease each other to show affection.
Now we are parents to two small girls, and we try to find time to spend alone together. On a recent date night, we sat on a restaurant deck, overlooking a San Francisco sunset.
“I miss your dad,” Peter said, teary-eyed. “I wish he could see the family we’ve created together.”
My eyes watered as we locked eyes. “I miss him, too,” I replied and smiled.
In that moment, I knew Peter saw me—that he’d seen me all along. He saw me as a person capable of carrying many things, a person with whom he could share not only the weight of grief but also his love. And for that I’m very grateful.
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