My dad lost consciousness on Saturday night. My mom told me to go home and sleep, that she’d call me if it looked like he was going to go. I passed out on my parents’ couch, making peace with the fact that I would probably miss the end. It was okay. I had said good-bye, told him I loved him. But the next morning, when I woke up, he was still holding on (he was always strong, he didn’t want to go), so back I went. We picked up our routine again—chair, bench, family lounge—and we sat there. Waiting. All day Sunday, into Monday. Each breath got slower and rougher—I use a French press now because I can’t bear the percolator—and we sat and listened to every one.
Sometimes a team of doctors would come in and loom over us with well-rehearsed but clinical concern. “How are you doing?” they would ask. Oh, you mean besides sitting here on this plastic hospital chair listening to the world’s best dude struggle for breath for the past thirty-six hours? Um, fucking gangbusters, I guess. “Is there anything we can do?” Apparently not, considering this whole long-slow-death thing that’s happening in this room right now. Also, you’re the doctor. You tell me.
I have never wanted anything as much as I wanted that shitty purgatory to be over. Except for one thing—which was for that shitty purgatory to never be over. Because when it’s over, it’s over. And eventually it was. Monday afternoon, my dad stopped breathing, faded to black-and-white like an old movie, and—I don’t know how else to describe it—flattened slightly, as though whatever force was keeping him in three dimensions had abruptly packed up and moved on. He was, and then he wasn’t. One moment his body was the locus of his personhood, the next moment our memories had to pick up the slack.
A nurse brought us granola bars and juice boxes on a little rolling cart, like a “your dad died” door prize. A guy with a mop came in to start cleaning up the room for the next patient. There was someone with a clipboard, asking questions. “Could you give us a fucking minute?” my mom snapped. “My husband just died thirty seconds ago.”
We sat with the body that used to be him. I didn’t understand the point, honestly.
Back in November, before Thanksgiving, before the tree fell on the house, before the hospital, Aham and I met up at a bar on Capitol Hill. We hadn’t spoken in a week or so, and my pain and anger had cooled to something more permeable. I’d spent that time with friends and family, eating and drinking and carrying on, coming back to myself—getting reacquainted with the person I’d been before Aham, even before Mike. I had an identity other than my relationship—I remembered it now—and this grimy fish tank I built around us hadn’t been good for me either.
Grudgingly, I’d come to see Aham’s point a little bit. He fell in love with this person, and in my desperation to hang on to him, I morphed myself into something else entirely. He wanted a partner but I gave him a parasitic twin. Except worse than that. A parasitic twin that cried all the time. Worst X-Files episode ever.
At the bar, Aham and I ate tater tots and got drunk. We didn’t talk about our relationship and I didn’t cry. I felt detached; my capacity for sadness was maxed out. I had given up on trying to force him to come back to me, and he apologized for trying to force me to be his friend. Somehow, we had fun. Relief poured back and forth between us, quietly electric. Aham had a gleam I hadn’t seen in months. For a minute, we held hands, and something woke, tiny but palpable, in my chest. Outside, it snowed, big, fat, wet flakes. I dropped him at the bus stop and said I’d see him in L.A., feeling something that wasn’t quite despair for the first time in a month. He said we’d talk. Of course, that never happened—he flew back down the day after the tree fell, and I was already gone.
I took my bereavement juice box to the family lounge and called Aham in L.A.
“Can you just come?” I sobbed.
“Of course,” he said.
We weren’t back together, but we weren’t not together. We weren’t sleeping together, but he slept in the bed with me and held on to me as much as I needed. He ran errands for my mom, made her laugh, cooked eggs Benedict, booked a piano player for the funeral, figured out how to get a banquet license while I cried in the liquor store. My aunt and uncle came up from Arizona and stayed with us; Aham’s girls would come on the weekends; friends and family dropped by nearly every day. We sat around and drank beer and watched football, all piled together in that little white house. It was a beautiful chaos, the same kind my mom grew up in and loved so much, the kind that I never understood growing up alone. It’s weird to look back at the saddest month of my life and see that little vein of joy.
Aham and I weren’t getting back together—we swore we weren’t, we couldn’t—but when I wasn’t looking, he had become my family anyway.
The Beginning
We went back to L.A. and lived in limbo for a few months. Aham went on tour; I started working at Jezebel. We weren’t “together,” but we were happy in a totally unfamiliar way.
I’m not saying that if your relationship is in trouble you should cross your fingers that your dad dies.* But after my dad’s funeral, I was older. Aham wasn’t the only thing in my world anymore. My pain (and, later, my career) had pushed him aside a little bit, and that space was exactly what he needed. “I am a narcissist,” he jokes, “but I didn’t actually want to date my own reflection.” Aham had come through for me, in that month of emotional triage, with a selflessness that I think surprised us both—not out of some sense of obligation, but because he really wanted to be there, in my mom’s basement, mixing gin and tonics for my auntie Astri.
It was a horrendous period, but somehow we had fun. We worked so hard to make each other laugh. We were just ourselves again. It was like a reset.
When Aham got back from tour, we sat down for a two-day feelings marathon. Even for me, a professional leaking sad-bag, it was a nightmare. There were scheduled breaks. We punched in and out like trudging coal miners. We wrote up a contract specifying how much crying was allowed. (My opening offer was “100 percent of the time”; Aham low-balled with a blank stare.) The details are boring, and some of them are just mine, but at the end of it, we were a couple again. I don’t even think of it as “getting back together,” because it didn’t feel like a reconvening of the old relationship—it was a new one.
“If we’re going to do this,” he told me, giving me his most Intense Face, “we’re really doing it. Don’t change your mind on me.”
It’s hard to talk about, because the realist in me (i.e., my mom) kind of doesn’t believe that “couples getting back together” is a real thing. It’s something I believed in when I was a child, when I understood a relationship as something that happened to you, not something you built, and I thought The Parent Trap was the ultimate love story. But we really did do it, and the only explanation I can offer is that we weren’t the same people in Relationship: Part Deux as we were in Relationship: The Phantom Menace.
Aham still wasn’t sure that he believed in marriage anymore. It was understandable—he’d been divorced twice in the previous six years. I used up some of my tear allotment on that, not because I have any particular attachment to the institution of marriage, but because I just wanted to prove to the world that I was worth marrying. I grew up assuming that I would never get married, because marriage was for thin women, the kind of women who deserved to be collected. How could I be a bride when I was already what men most feared their wives would become? I was the mise en place for a midlife crisis. I was the Ghost of Adultery Future. At least, that’s what I’d been taught. Aham was my shot at vindication. Come on, man. Think of all the fat girls we can inspire with our lifelong legal commitment!
“Okay, what if we still like each other this much in five years?” I bargained, annoyingly persistent but in a charming way, I’m sure. “Can we talk about getting married then?”
“In five years, if we still like each other exactly this much, sure, we can talk about getting married,” Aham said, rolling his eyes. “You are the most annoying person on earth.” That was good enough for me. It was basically a proposal.