January: The Opposite of Grief is Comfort

I still have photo from our first date. A photographer was in the bar — a bar I’d been so accustomed to, a bar that was home to me. We’d been sitting at the orange tables talking, drinking, having a good first date. The photographer came up to us, asked if she could take our photo, I looked to him to see his reaction.

“Sure,” he said.

I was wearing jeans, a black shirt and a cardigan with yellow polka-dots. My blonde hair was straight, I was wearing red lipstick as I always do, it’s what I’m comfortable doing. He was wearing a blue flannel with the sleeves rolled up. It was March 28, 2015.

By January 14, 2016 we’d be done.

“I need to know where your head is. There’s been a disconnect since New Year’s Eve,” I told him, doing my best not to make eye contact otherwise I’d cry.

“Yeah, I think this is done. It’s nothing you did. It’s just time to end it.”

Nine months. It had officially become the longest relationship I’d had in my 24 years, yet, we were never a real couple.

“I mean, you were a chill person to hang out with. And it was fun.”

“Look, I like you, and I would be with you if that’s what you wanted,” was all I could muster to say. I wanted so much for him to say something, to let me know that he too felt that maybe we could make it work.

He couldn’t, no matter how much I wanted him to. When he left — without a hug, a kiss — I found myself curled up on the couch and crying. I couldn’t help but wonder: How do you grieve something you never truly had?

Grief was something that played out in my life frequently when I was with him. We met just a few weeks before my father died. I had traveled back to Minnesota to take care of all of that, even though I was nowhere near ready for it.

Lauren — Sat, April 11, 4:41 p.m.: Guess who is stranded in Minnesota for another week… This gal, ha.
Mark— 4:54 p.m.: How’d you get stuck?
Lauren — 7:12 p.m.: It’s a long story. It’s just family stuff all week for the funeral. Hopefully I’ll be back in NC by next Sunday. It’s been an interesting 48 hours, that’s all I can say.
Mark — 7:21 p.m.: I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it was a funeral. How you holding up?
Lauren — 7:52 p.m.: Thanks. I appreciate it. I wasn’t really telling people it was a funeral, because I wasn’t ready to admit my dad was going to be gone. I’m a lot better than I was this morning. How’s beerfest?
Mark — 7:56 p.m.: It’s amazing. I know I couldn’t handle that. You’re a badass bitch.

I wish I would have known it then, but I’d end up wanting him in my life, and I never understood why. It started off innocent enough — he told me that he wasn’t looking for a relationship, and I knew I didn’t want to jump into anything immediately after my father died, but maybe I did exactly what I didn’t want to to do.

He became comfort, he became everything I wanted, everything I needed, even though I only saw him maybe once a week. I didn’t need more than that. I needed him to just exist, and be the person who I could confide in, the person who I could bare my soul to, a person I could build something with. Someone I could be comfortable with. But in the back of my head, I knew we couldn’t build anything.

One of my best friends said it best: Give it some credit. You two were really good for each other. But now you’ve grown, you were there for each other when you needed it. And you’re not the best for each other. Good yes, but not what you each deserve. Ya know? It was a good thing. Don’t look back on it negatively. It was good, hell it may have been perfect for that moment. And now you close a chapter (isn’t that what they say?). You’ve got a good bunch of people right now. Feel good about yourself and your friends and (when you want to) add someone to the mix that complements it all.

She was right, he was everything I needed in that moment. He was the answer to all the problems I had during the year. I was mourning the death of my father — the only man I’ve ever loved. And I hoped, that by letting Mark into my life, I’d be able to figure out what it is to love someone.

And I think, maybe I did. I might not have been truly vulnerable with him, but being with Mark allowed me the opportunity to fall in love with myself, and learn that the right people come into your life when you need them. I needed him, and I think maybe I’ll continue to need him, but need in the sense that he’s the person who made me realize that I’m going to be OK.

I don’t know how to cope, I don’t think I’ll ever know how to cope with breakups, in fact, as soon as it happened I texted my roommates to come back home and take care of me. They took me to a bar, because that’s what I do best. Bars. Drinking with the guys. Being one of the guys. That’s who I’ve always been, and learning that someone would be with me taught me to be a better version of myself.

We sat there at the bar, looking at the menu. A basketball game was on, all I could think of was how some of my first conversations with Mark were about basketball — a topic I was slowly learning about thanks to living in North Carolina and having an editor that used to be a sports writer. It was something Mark and I learned to connect with. I’d text him about games I was watching, and we’d discuss them. I once invited him to a Duke basketball game, but he couldn’t come — I took my roommate, but it was the thought that counted.

Even after the fact, when his alma mater went up against Duke I wanted to text him and talk about the game, debrief, talk about it. Instead, I was on a date with someone else — no one who would have been a real suitor, but I was a bar watching a game with someone who was totally disinterested in the game.

I couldn’t help but feel let down. It’s the let down that hurts the most, because you never expect it.

I know I never expected to run into Mark a week after we ended everything at the same bar where we had our first date. I’d had a long day at work, an extremely long day. I’d just gotten to the bar, gotten a drink and went to the food truck parked outside to get food.

I was waiting for my meal when I heard his voice. It almost didn’t register at first. I looked up from my phone, and there he was. We saw each other, I feigned a smile. He just turned back to his friends — friends I’d never met. It took all of my strength to not cry or say something. During the entire nine months we were together I never once ran into him out and about, but exactly a week after we ended things there he was — five yards in front of me, frozen in time. That’s when grief hit me.

I’d ignored the immensity of the situation, just like I’d ignored my father’s death for so long. I’d cover it up with something else — work, booze, dating — I always had an excuse to not call my grief counselor back. By nature I never want to admit when I’m grieving, usually I hide for a day or two, never more than a weekend and turn back up as if nothing had happened.

Only once did a break-up ever turn into something worse, but that was college, and hair grows back.

The night we broke up when me and my roommates left the bar I crawled into bed. I couldn’t think of anything other than needing comfort. I wanted to call my father — very few times in my life was I ever 100 percent emotionally honest with my parents. To this day I’m still not completely open about everything, but for the first time in a long time, I just wanted to talk to him. I wanted to hear his voice, and hear him tell me that it’s going to be OK, and that I’m going to be better off without Mark, no matter what my feelings were for him.

You never realize how much you need someone in your life for these moments until they’re no longer a phone call away. I think realizing that was worse than realizing that I was no longer “seeing someone” or “part of something.” You can move on from that, but you can’t move on from grief.

Grief haunts you in the weirdest of ways. It creeps up on you in the middle of your work day. It’s in the back of your mind until all of a sudden it’s there, staring at you in the mirror, forcing you to come to terms with everything that you’ve buried under the doldrums of daily life.

To me, the opposite of grief is comfort. For a long time comfort came at a price, or rather came with a scar. It’s not a subject I talk about a lot, very rarely does it ever need to be mentioned. But for years I was a self-injurer. Even now, when it gets tough, I know where to go to find comfort in the hardest form. Relapse after relapse I felt worse and worse about it. The only thing that stopped it was acknowledging it and fighting it.

That night in January I fought it. I wasn’t that strong after my father’s diagnosis. I remember relapsing, and feeling ashamed that at 22 I was still battling my demons, demons I’d hid only to be brought out by a professor who read something I didn’t mean for them to. When my father died I had comfort around me — family, friends, booze — but when I was alone back in North Carolina on that January night, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of profound loss.

Loss perhaps agitated by knowing that my future is drastically different from other 24-year-old women. I don’t talk about marriage anymore, that’s too much for me to think about. Kids? Out of the question because that means my father never gets to be a grandfather, and I know that’s something he so dearly looked forward to. My future has now been taken over by my past.

But, as February began, I remembered what comfort could be — It’s knowing that everything will be OK. It’s knowing that even when you’ve broken up with someone, you can reach out when you need to and he’ll respond. It’s knowing that you have friends that care. It’s knowing that you’re not your darkest moments.

And it’s knowing that at the end of the day, everything changes. I’m more at ease than I ever could have been with Mark. But relationships happen for a reason, you grow from them, you learn from them.

Looking back on that cold night in January, one thing sticks out in my mind more than the thoughts of heartbreak, it was the song “Ceremony” by New Order, a song that had for many years in high school, meant comfort.

Watching love grow, forever,
Letting me know, forever

I remembered in that moment, that life is a series of forevers broken down into bits and pieces to be put together day-by-day. And that to me, is comforting on so many levels.

*Names have been changed