Eternity.

Sobbing in the movie theater at 11am MT

I very rarely dream of Aaron, though there has not been a day since he left this Earth that I haven’t thought of him. His photos hang in our home, his name stays on my lips, his eyes gaze at me from our son’s face. I remember how his front teeth folded in towards each other, the shake of his shoulders when he really laughed, his bad tattoos. I remember him in songs he never got to hear and jokes he never got to tell.

My current husband calls me by the nickname Aaron coined¹ and uses the vacuum Aaron bought. He is raising the son that I had with Aaron, and our three other children, who have no biological tie to Aaron, wear his old tee shirts and know his old jokes.

Aaron is everywhere and nowhere all at once, like every person we grieve.

Dreams, though, feel different, more like a visit from another realm than a memory. I see him across the room at a crowded party, laughing (always laughing), and try to make my way to him. He’ll catch my eye, smile, and wave me over, but no matter how quickly I push through the crowd I’m always two seconds too late, I’ve just missed him.

In one, I am seated at Sunday dinner with my family when Aaron takes the seat across from me at the center of the table. We must have been expecting him because the table is set for seven, but it still feels like a surprise. Everyone -- Matthew, Aaron, me, the kids -- is so happy, so excited to catch up, that it takes me a minute to realize what I’ve done. I’ve gotten married. I have four kids. I lean across the table to confess this to Aaron, that he died and this is my life now. He smiles. “Okay,” he says, unbothered. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out.” Someone passes him the potatoes, and I wake up.

Though the details change a bit, this dream has returned with the same key beats: the delight of seeing Aaron again, the fear I’ll have to choose between them, the assurance that I won’t have to.

And of course I won’t; husbands don’t come back from the dead (except when they fake it!). My psyche is working through the anxiety I’ve felt since I met Matthew in the depths of my grief for Aaron. How dare I be struck by lightning twice? How could I possibly love both of them? Honor both of them?

Who knows!

I am in love with two men, a kind of spiritual polyamory that (in my limited experience with this kind of thing) works best when one of them is dead.

This is confusing for some people. It would have been confusing for me before I experienced it. Love, to me, was a finite resource, clawed back from every relationship that ended. It was silly and immature of me, but I was silly and immature, believing that the proof of my love for one person was my denial that it had ever been given to another.

Love is not a finite resource and death is not a break-up and many things can be true at once but there are still people (online. Always online) who believe that my love for Aaron is in direct competition with my love for Matthew. Comments I’ve received include:

But who do you love more? I love them equally unless Matthew disagrees with me in any way, and then he’s #2.

But how would you feel if Matthew was widowed and loved his dead wife? I’d actually feel really weird if he didn’t love his imaginary dead wife.

But isn’t Matthew jealous of Aaron? Yes, he’d rather be dead than married to me!

Last week I sat in a movie theatre and watched the feelings I’ve had for the past 10 years play out on a big screen in Eternity, a comedy (I swear it’s a comedy it’s so funny I laughed so hard!) about a woman (Elizabeth Olsen, spiritually a widow, she is one of us, she belongs) who gets to the afterlife and has to decide whether she’ll be spending eternity with Larry, her husband of decades, or Luke, her first husband who died in the Korean war.

I had refused to see it for weeks on the grounds of me being personally envious that I hadn’t thought of this before, seeing as how I’ve literally been asked who I would pick if I got to heaven (a place I won’t end up) and had to choose between my husbands (not a canonical part of Catholic heaven as far as I know)².

I laughed loud enough to annoy people around me, I left the theater twice to sob in the hallway, and Matthew and I stayed in our seats until the final credits to collect ourselves (and kiss a little).

Wind Phone: Part One

Eternity isn’t asking the dumb questions I’ve been asked (to my face and online). The movie uses a silly (or in my case anxiety-inducing) premise to show us what we know in our hearts when we aren’t being insecure and self-centered: that love changes us.

The version of me that Matthew fell in love with is the version who loved and lost Aaron, who loved (or tried to, or claimed to) several other people before him. That love is indelible, it’s a kind of alchemy that has changed every cell in my body and every thought in my head. A thousand invisible strings connected me to Matthew, but Aaron is the thread that brought us together. Matthew has never met or loved a Nora who didn’t know Aaron, and he never will.

Matthew’s love is a kind of alchemy, too. I am not the same girl who spent our second (third?) date reading him Mary Oliver poetry and crying on my living room floor about my dead husband. I am grateful that he sat on that floor with me, and in the past ten years has helped pull me to my feet.

I have said that we don’t move on, we move forward. I’ve lived that, too. And while I have brought Aaron’s love with me everywhere I go, I cannot bring him. The last Nora that Aaron will ever know died with him in 2014. The two of them are preserved together in the amber of my memories and my iCloud. I love them: their innocence, their bravery, their beauty.

I don’t need to wonder what might have been because what I had and have is more than enough for one lifetime, for eternity.

And if by chance those dreams come true, and Aaron sits at my dinner table with Matthew and the kids and it’s not a dream? We’ll pass the potatoes and figure it out.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

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Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

1. I went my entire life thinking I would never have a real nickname until I met Aaron and he said "Chronicles of Nornia?" Which became Nornia, shortened to Norn.

2. I said I’d choose John Cena. I can’t find the Tiktok video because periodically I go through all of my accounts and wipe them clean. Probably time to do that again soon!