Big Arms Big issues

A piece of paper stands between me and the grief I am not allowed to feel. At the time of Jason’s passing, my official title was “girlfriend.” The ultimate source of truth, our Facebook status, says we were “in a relationship.” Not married, not engaged, simply “in a relationship.” My friend says it should count for something I was in his Facebook profile picture when he passed. I’ll be forever memorialized in that way. In today’s modern era, that’s as good as it gets. Forevermore, when people stumble upon his page, they will see that, at some point, a girl with long brown hair and a discolored front tooth meant an ambiguous “something” to him. Sometimes, I wish MySpace’s top eight was still around; I assume I’d be his number one; he was undoubtedly mine. That would settle this debate once and for all.

What do you do when the title doesn’t match what you know to be true in your heart about your relationship?

“This was Jason’s girlfriend,” people say, introducing me. I hate that. It implies that we were casually dating, seeing what the other person was about, weighing our options, and keeping one eye open to a better possibility. That we weren’t committed, maybe just playing around, still open to the idea that it wouldn’t work out. They don’t know that the opportunity to part ways from each other was slammed shut long ago. We couldn’t have broken up even if we tried. We were it; we knew that deep in our souls, we felt its truth in our bones. 

Jason and I were married in every sense of the word except legal. I’d often say to him, “We’re married enough.” In many ways, we felt more married than some of our friends who bore the legal title. We’d been going to couples counseling, blending our family, creating a life together, and being intentional in everything we did as we built towards a beautiful future. 

I was the holdup. I was taking my sweet time on a wedding; Jason was about a year ahead of me in wanting to get married. He was always ahead of me, seeing what he wanted and going for it. I was busy trying to protect myself, but in the end, I wasn’t scared of the right things. It wasn’t going to be another divorce or breakup that did us in, but his utterly tragic and unexpected death. I hadn’t figured that one into my list of potential things that could go wrong. Now I feel silly; I wish I’d just said yes; I’d do anything to have the memory of his proposal, of seeing his face light up when I walked down the aisle, of him playing his guitar for me on our special day. What was I so worried about anyway? Despite my best attempts to shield myself from more pain, life found a way to insert herself anyway. I was paying attention to the wrong “what if.” 

I wish I could summarize my situation with that magical word, “widow.” It conjures images of a woman garbed in black, weeping beneath the veil shielding her face, dabbing at tears with a handkerchief as her husband’s coffin is lowered into the ground. Everyone knows what a widow is. The term brings with it an inherent level of respect and validity to grief; it entitles you to feel all the rage, fear, and despair of someone who has genuinely lost their stability, their love, and their future.  It ties a nice bow onto the package of suffering; it signifies to everyone exactly who you were to the deceased and how much attention and support you deserve. I suddenly find myself jealous of this outdated Victorian mourner. Perhaps I should purchase a black hat myself.

I want to call myself one, a widow. Instead, I stumble over phrases like “soon-to-be fiancé. or “life partner.” They gave us nametags at his funeral and asked us to identify how we knew Jason. How did I know Jason? I knew him as a friend, a colleague, a lover, a healer, an adventure mate, a scuba buddy, and a daredevil. The father of our unborn children, the keeper of my heart, the man who held my dreams in his hand, the builder of my future.

I knew him in all the ways except the one that mattered most, his wife. My hand hovered over the nametag, a thousand titles flitting through my brain. “Girlfriend”? Too casual. “Wife”? Too imposing, someone would call me out on that big fat lie. “Fiance,”? But is that real if he never asked? “Soon-to-be fiance, soulmate, and future mother of his child”? God, that’s just getting ridiculous. The only thing I could think of that came close to encapsulating it all was “love.” I was, simply put, Jason’s love, and he was mine. 

My friend made my nametag for me and settled on “Jason’s fiance and love.” I silently thanked her for giving me the validation I so desperately wanted. My heart cried out at the joy of getting an actual title, a real claim to the grief I knew was true inside me. 

I’ve been trying to find the right fit, trying to sum up my level of pain without overstepping. I don’t want to offend anyone or make them think I am laying claim to something that isn’t mine to lay claim to. But even that is an odd sentence. Since 2021, I have spent nearly every day with this man; we built a life and dreamed of a future together, but now he is gone. Gone before he could give me a wedding band, gone before we could make a shared announcement of our engagement on social media, gone before we signed the papers, so he takes my right to grieve with him. 

I am mourning the loss of a husband and child, but I have no title to lay claim to those losses, so I find myself hovering around, hoping everyone sees my grief for what it is. I feel like a ghost in this new landspace. Floating through the shadowland of almost there, but not quite yet. I tiptoe around others and hope for whatever I can get. His apartment is returned to the landlord; I surrender my keys, saying goodbye to a home not recognized as mine. I find myself worrying in silence as my financial situation changes in ways nobody thinks to think about because we weren’t officially married. I am grief adjacent, near to the reality of my situation, but not quite able to assert it. I was almost a wife, nearly a mother, but the government hadn’t ordained either, so I am kinda, sorta almost sad.

I am living the life of a widow, with only the status of a girlfriend. 

I don’t know what to call myself; I genuinely don’t. I desperately want to call Jason my husband, but fear people will find that a little overzealous. I don’t want to impose. But I can’t just refer to him as my boyfriend. We’d left that title back in 2022. I toy with the phrase “fiancé” and suppose that’s the best I will get. He had a ring, and I wear it now. I’m devastated he never got to give it to me, but I’m grateful for this token of his love; it’s a tangible symbol that we were somehow more. It gives me an inch of the credibility I long for. Sometimes, I want to shove it in people’s faces and dare them to ignore the reality of what I’ve lost.

If he had passed two months later, if we’d had the chance to have our little ceremony on the North Shore this September, if we’d signed a piece of paper and paid our dues to Uncle Sam, this whole process would look different. How odd it is that the choice to delay the legality of a decision made long ago in our hearts can have such practical ramifications in the face of crisis. Why did we wait? Was it the weather? We wanted to be married in the fall; summer is too hot. Or was it that the only week we’d have time was the last one in September, or was it fear or the little rebellious voice in me saying, “screw marriage, we don’t need it.” These reasons pale in the face of the reality that I want to grieve Jason as a widow, but by a twist of fate and fluke of time, I am, seemingly, not allowed to.

Sometimes, I convince myself I’m glad we were never married, as if that will make this easier. I pretend we were only casually dating and that I’ll find someone new soon enough, as if by virtue of us not having married, he is replaceable by the faces I can swipe through on Hinge. I tell myself I’m so lucky we never sealed the deal; now I won’t have to say to a future suitor I’m divorced AND widowed; that would just be preposterous at the age of 32. Now I can say divorced and….something more elusive, my boyfriend died, sad but not a big deal; it’s not that much baggage; look away from the giant suitcases of grief and trauma I’m toting around. 

My mind is playing tricks. Telling me little lies to get me through the achingly long days. At the end of it all, as the sun sets, in the stillness of night, when I reach over to his side of the bed and am met with nothing, I know the truth. My soulmate, my person, my one and only, my love, has died. No title can hold that much grief. I can’t play mind games forever, so I try to accept it for what it is, for what I know it was, even if others can’t or won’t externally validate it.

So, really, what am I? I’m Jason’s love. And maybe his fiancé. His future wife? Just a girlfriend? It all depends on who you ask.