In Another Life

Notes on the multiverse.

In another life, I would be your girl. We’d keep all our promises, be us against the world.

-Katy Perry/Me

My husband Aaron turned 45 on August 21. Or he would have, had he not died in 2014.

The son we had together is 11 now, almost 12, an age that was unimaginable to me in those first months of new widowhood when he was still a soft little bear cub of a toddler. He has his father’s eyes, his father’s build, his father’s comedic timing.

One week into the new school year the two of us were sprinting through a Michael’s parking lot at 6PM to get the required materials for a presentation that was due the next day, a sacred rite of both childhood and parenthood.

“What if,” Ralph said as our feet slapped against the asphalt, “Papa was faking it the whole time and he never actually died?”

I laughed, loudly and genuinely. It’s the kind of prank I could see Aaron pulling if I couldn’t also see his last moments so vividly in my brain.

“Do you ever think about that?” my son asked as we slid through the automatic doors and into the air conditioning, “about if Papa was still alive?”

The answer, of course, is of course.

I have dreams — visits, really — where I spend the night following Aaron through a party, just missing him until the very end, where I finally catch up to him. It’s so real that it feels like he’s there and like he never left. I tell him everything he’s missed in a desperate monologue, only to realize at the very end of our conversation that I’m married again.

“I’m sorry,” I always say, “I didn’t know you were coming back.”

He is never upset or even surprised, and seems just fine with the idea of living as a throuple with me and Matthew and all of the kids.

I wake from these dreams feeling as though I’ve actually seen Aaron, actually caught up with him, actually agreed to live with both him and Matthew in unholy matrimony.¹

Which is really not all that different from how I live right now.

Aaron is everywhere in our house and in our family; we wouldn’t have each other if I hadn’t lost Aaron.

But we also wouldn’t have each other if Matthew hadn’t married that specific person at that specific time, or if I’d left New York City six months later or earlier, or if any other significant or seemingly insignificant variable had been any different.

There is no today without yesterday, and you cannot change one thing without changing everything.