Page 29 of Letting Go at 40

2 Years Ago

September

Mason Leaves

[Anna]

After the mayhem of the past thirteen months, September is like a door slammed shut to block out noise and chaos. My world becomes exceedingly quiet.

I return to teaching in a substitute position. Calvin and Bryce fall into their high school roles as a senior and a sophomore, and Mila begins sixth grade at the middle school. Logan’s daughter Lorna is a year ahead of her, but it doesn’t prevent the two girls from being best friends, and my home is a revolving door of Lorna and Mila here or the now-cousins spending time at Logan and Autumn’s house half a mile up the road.

Either way, I’m often alone.

At forty-one, I didn’t want widowhood to define me, but I didn’t know how to be me without Ben, which actually scared me a little.

I’d spoken to a good friend of mine, Jenna Davis, about my fears. Back in the day, we’d been secondary education majors together at Michigan State University, and she’d become one of my best friends in college. We kept in touch over the years, sharing through social media the progression of our lives, but we also reached out when something more personal happened. She’d lost her husband in a tragic way a few years ago, and as I’d recently lost Ben, she attended his funeral. We talk a little more often now.

“As women, we’re giant puzzles. Ben was . . . is a piece of you, but he isn’t the whole you. You were married, yes. You also have children and a job. Friends and other family members.” Jenna pauses on the phone.

She’d been a wild one in college and kept up her single-as-a-Pringle persona until well into her thirties. She reminded me in many ways of Mason. Then she’d met Ryan, and everything changed. Within months they were married with children and a mortgage.

“Life is full of adjustment periods, like our students transitioning back to school. A new set of classes and different combinations of kids within them. New teachers, too.” She exhales. “I should be good at analogies as an English teacher but I’m finding I’m not expressing well what I want to say. The thing is . . . you’re going through an adjustment period. And there is no definition of how to transition, only that it’s a process of change. We all develop at our own speed and there is no rush.”

Unfortunately, bitterness is seeping in about the changes in my life. The move from our home in Chicago. Giving up a teaching job that I’d loved. The pressure of substitute teaching.

Outside of widow, mother, teacher, friend, who the hell was Anna?

“Grieving is the same way, Anna. You’ll grieve the rest of your life, but the issue is not letting that grief consume you. You are alive and Ben would want you to live your life.” She pauses again, letting the hard truth sink in. “That’s how we honor those we’ve lost.”

I could say she knew where to place the proverbial knife in my chest, but her honesty is what I need. Too many people are sugarcoating Ben, like he’s some mythological god when he was a man. A wonderful, beautiful, kind man who I loved with everything in me, and because he was human, he was also mortal.

My grandmother lived a long life with my grandfather, but he died when I was a teenager. When I was older, I remember her telling me how she allowed herself two weeks to wallow after his passing. Then one day she knew she had to get out of bed and move forward. One day at a time, she told me. She didn’t want to miss out on what she still had by drowning in what she’d lost.

Ben is gone. The logic in my head knows he will never be coming back. The loneliness in my heart tells another story.

“I know,” I whisper to Jenna, fighting tears. The struggle to hold them at bay has ebbed and flowed like a tide. Some days are rougher waters than others, but I am getting better. It isn’t every day that I cry.

“By the way, did I mention I saw Mason Becker?” There is an unsettling cheer to Jenna’s voice as she says his name.

Mason and I haven’t had any contact since he left in August. It’s been nearly six weeks of silence after more than a year of him living in my home as the third roommate. Ben was the first. My kids were collectively second and Uncle Mason had become a permanent structure in our lives. A shadow of sorts.

His leaving was a different kind of loss for all of us.

“Really?” I try to keep my voice steady. “Where?”

“At a bar in Traverse.” Jenna chuckles. “Same old Mason. Think he’ll ever grow up?”

Same old Mason meant getting drunk and hooking up with a random woman. The sickening thought pools together in my belly because I don’t believe he is the same man he’d been before he shared a year of his life with us. He was different somehow. Or maybe it was just that the experience of losing Ben changed him like it had changed all of us. We each coped in our own way. For him, maybe it meant returning to old habits.

“You were at a bar?” A tease fills my throat, as I try to steer us away from Mason. Discussing him might lead to a confession I’d prefer to take to my grave.

“I had a date.” Jenna sighs, exasperated. “I’m too old for this shit.” Jenna is also forty-one and a single mother of two adorable little girls.

“God, I can’t imagine dating.” I used to cavalierly toss out those words, confident as a married woman I’d never have to tackle the uncertainty of dating. Now, my truth is I’m a widow. I’m essentially single and I literally cannot fathom ever being with another man.

But you kissed Mason.

I shake my head as if it will erase the reminder. I don’t want to think about my lapse in judgement and loss of control. I shouldn’t have let him kiss me.