Member-only story
Grief Delayed — Will It Compost?
This romantic image of D and me, taken when we decided to get married (in order to move off campus — my naive misunderstanding of the world), shows the very genuine affection of that time. I am sad now when I think about my parents’ efforts to “enrich” our new marriage: They gave us books such as Open Marriage and The Joys of Sex.
Those books, and the attitudes that came with them, led D and me into behavior that stifled the potential for trust and relying on each other. Our hasty finale — with D telling me to go ahead and move in with the fellow from work instead, and me thinking he was being generous and cheerful in saying that (I learned much later that he wept in private, but he made no effort to save the marriage) — meant that I did not take time to grieve for that first early marriage.
Instead, I plunged directly into the adventure of committed life with R. We soon left our chemistry-lab employment to embark on an adventure northward in a Land Rover, expecting to write a bestseller from the experience. I’ve written in other places about the “epic fail” of the trip, but it did at least take me into freelance writing for national magazines (low pay, but in print). When that, in turn, led to having a baby and moving to Vermont, and to R’s new interest in firearms, there was surely no time to miss anything left behind … other than my mother, who died abruptly…
