“Then we were barely married.”
Susan nods. “That’s what I thought you were going to say.”
My lips turn down.
“Who cares?” she says.
“What?”
“Who cares if you were barely married? It doesn’t mean you love him any less.”
“Well, but . . . ”
“Yes?”
“We were only together for six months before we got married.”
“So?”
“So, I mean, being married is what separates him from just some guy. It’s what proves he’s . . . he’s the love of my life.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she says. I just stare at her. “That doesn’t matter at all. It’s a piece of paper. A piece of paper you don’t even have, by the way. It means nothing.”
“It means everything!” I say.
“Listen to me; it means nothing. You think that some ten minutes you spent with Ben in a room defines what you meant to each other? It doesn’t. You define that. What you feel defines that. You loved him. He loved you. You believed in each other. That is what you lost. It doesn’t matter whether it’s labeled a husband or a boyfriend. You lost the person you love. You lost the future you thought you had.”
“Right,” I say.
“I was with Steven for thirty-five years before I lost him. Do you think I have more of a right to pain than you do?”
The answer is yes. I do think that. I’ve been terrified of that. I’ve been walking about feeling like an amateur, like an impostor, because of it.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Well, I don’t. Love is love is love. When you lose it, it feels like the shittiest disaster in the world. Just like dog shit.”
“Right.”
“When I lost Steven, I lost love, but I also lost someone I was attached to.”
“Right.”
“You didn’t have as much time as I did to be attached to the man you loved. But attachment and love are two different things. My heart was broken and I didn’t remember how to do things without him. I didn’t remember who I was. But you, you lived without Ben just last year. You can do it again. You can do it sooner than me. But the love, that’s the sharp pain that won’t stop. That’s the constant ache in your chest. That won’t go away easily.”
“I just feel like I had him for so little time,” I say. It’s difficult to talk about. It’s difficult because I work so hard to keep the self-pity at bay, and talking like this, talking about all of this, it’s like opening the door to my self-pity closet and asking its contents to spill all over the floor. “I didn’t have enough time with him,” I say, my voice starting to break, my lips starting to quiver. “It wasn’t enough time. Six months! That’s all I had.” I lose my breath. “I only got to be his wife for nine days.” I now begin to sob. “Nine days isn’t enough. It’s not enough.”
Susan comes closer to me, and she grabs my hand. She pushes my hair back off my forehead. She catches my eye.
“Sweetheart, I’m telling you, you love someone like that, you love them the right way, and no time would be enough. Doesn’t matter if you had thirty years,” she tells me. “It wouldn’t be enough.”
She’s right, of course. If I’d had ten more years with Ben, would I be sitting here saying, “It’s okay, I had him long enough?” No. It would never have been enough.
“I’m scared,” I tell her. “I’m scared that I’ll have to move on and meet someone and spend my life with them and it will seem like”—my voice cracks again—“it will seem like Ben was . . . I don’t want him to be ‘my first husband.’ ”