When Loss Leads to Love

My friend Wendy and I grew up together, got married within a year of each other and had children only months apart from each other. Six years ago we had the perfect fairy tale lives — good marriages, happy children, parents who lived close by. We both fit into neat little boxes. Then my marriage failed, and four years later Wendy died of breast cancer. Both our households were reduced to three. Of course this was impossibly hard for both our
families, but I've also seen how loss can open up your life to new kinds
of love that you never could have imagined before.
I spent this weekend with Wendy’s family to celebrate her life at Runway for Recovery, a breast cancer awareness benefit. Both sides of her family were there: her parents, her brother,
her husband's parents and sister and brother in law, her aunt and her
husband's aunt, her parents' long term family friends and me.   We all
bonded over our deep love for Wendy.  It's strange to be at such an
intimate family gathering when it is not your family.  But because of her
death, I was welcomed into her family in a way I never could have been
before.  I have now become family because I share in their grief and loss.
So although we were drawn together by sadness, the new love in my life
from Wendy's family is a huge gift to me.  I have new people to love.
Likewise, I was stopped in my tracks the other day by a note on Facebook.
It was a friend's birthday and her stepdaughter had posted on her page.
The post said "You are such a wonderful person and every day I am so
grateful to have you in my life."  I am sure that when her father first
told her years ago that he was leaving the family to marry a woman not her
mom that she could never have imagined getting to the point where she is
now.  What she perceived as an ending of love was actually just a
beginning.  She gained two new siblings and the deep love of my friend.
It's not what we usually celebrate or aspire towards, but divorce can have
the unintended consequence of adding love to our lives.
Both divorce and death pry open our lives and expose us to new people that
we wouldn't have encountered otherwise.   Since my divorce and the death
of my closest friend, I have had incredibly intimate conversations with
strangers about loss and resilience. I decided during the grief of my
divorce that I couldn't keep it to myself, I couldn't just pretend that
everything was fine.  And this opened me up to conversations and
connections with people that I never would have had before.   And when I
faced the death of my friend, I likewise found incredible comfort by
sharing my story with strangers, most of whom had stories of their own.
For the first 43 years of my life, I didn't need people in the way I do
today.  I had my husband and children and we were secure in our happy,
insular lives.  Now I feel much more connected to the larger world.  I
realize how much pain is out there, but also how much love.  Early on
after my husband left, friends treated me to a massage.  I cried through
the whole thing, and the kind woman kneading my back talked to me the
whole time, telling me about her divorce and the death of a child and how
she had made it through these hard things.  It was the first time I had
cried in front of a stranger, but I left there feeling deeply comforted by
hearing her story.
In my job I work I work with young women to
hone their leadership skills.   One of the things we talk about frequently
during trainings is the power of telling your own story and using the
truth in your life to connect with people.  At first, their inclination is
to stick to the facts and to leave the personal out of it.  But the facts
are dry without the context of why they matter to you.  I have heard
thousands of their stories and so many are about pain. But I watch the
faces of the women listening and see how powerful it is for them to hear
what other people have gone through.   When we lay ourselves bare and let
others into our grief and loss and pain, we open the door to love and to
true connection.
I have dinner with my former parents in law about once a month, just the
three of us.  At the end, as we are saying goodbyes, we often talk about
how grateful we are for each other.  It is an unusual relationship - we
are no longer obligated by marriage to love each other and to spend time
together: our love is a choice.  It is these nontraditional relationships
that enrich my life now in ways I could never have imagined before. They
make loss so much easier to bear.