Falling in love sometimes feels like tripping over yourself. It’s one of life’s big messy adventures, and one of my greatest joys. Over a lifetime of relationships, I’ve become a connoisseur of its many stages. That deep belly-tickle at discovering rapport with a promising stranger—the hint of recognition, the surge of chemicals. Ooooh, he cute-cute. Then their intoxicating smell, slowly becoming familiar; the whisper of a private nickname as lips brush the ear. The gradual softening into a relationship, as falling in love expands into love, the enduring kind. The body, heart, and psyche are forever changed, and that love stays on in us till we die.
Falling in love can create a paralyzing fear of death. We become so much more aware of our mortality and that of our beloved when we are in love. We fear losing them, and life holds more value and purpose. It can be terrifying. But what else matters except opening ourselves to love? It’s one of the “whys” of life. It shapes our fullest, most vivid memories. And its ultimate loss feels like an unmendable rupture. When a loved one dies, their love for you and your love for them doesn’t go anywhere. It just changes form.
I’ve declared undying love for a solid number of the people I’ve dated, and even some strangers (like Tevin Campbell). My friends and family mostly roll their eyes at me: Here she goes again. I laugh off their teasing and try to ignore their implicit judgments. Like that I run hot and cold, that I am a flirt, that I am flighty, that the love I feel—and express—is somehow less profound or less meaningful than the adult, “real” kind of love.
Love doesn’t look like one thing. Some of us feel it, in its purest form, in a series of encounters; others in long-term relationships. For some, monogamy is a sacred covenant. For others, it can be a jail. However you come by genuine love, you should take it and you should give it. My people might tease me for how fiercely I seize love when it is available. But my love declarations have been real. Every time. No matter how it ends. Because eventually my lover will die, as will I.
When Kip walked into my life, I had just arrived out west with my juris Doctor from University of Colorado Boulder School of Law shoved into my bags. I was in Los Angeles visiting my cousin Tina for a few days before I began my post–law school “adult” life in Oakland. I stopped at a gas station in Hollywood to fill up my green Honda Accord after the drive from Colorado, and he was across the pump filling up his green Ford Explorer. Our vehicles were similar hues and, seeking a way to move from sly glances and smiles to conversation, he commented on it.
He was six-two, dark-skinned, and buff, with skinny locs that fell all the way down his back and eyebrow and tongue rings that gave him an intriguing edge for an eighth-grade English teacher. (If he’d been my eighth-grade English teacher, I would have failed over and over again just so I could stare at him.) We realized he was born exactly one week before me. We felt like kindred spirits.
He was so many things in one: a sneaker head with an immaculate collection of Jordans in every color and style. A musician, producing funky beats for hungry young rappers out of his makeshift, in-home music studio, which was as pristine as his closet’s perfectly arranged sneaker collection. On our first date, he took me to Toi Thai on Sunset Boulevard. I had pad thai with a side of brown rice, which I ate with a spoon in one hand and fork in the other, like I’d learned while living in Thailand for a summer. He marveled at my agility. I ate too much because I was nervous. He ate almost nothing, because he was nervous too.
We got into a conversation with our waiter about then-president George W. Bush. Our waiter was a fan; Kip was not. I pretended to be offended by Kip’s sweeping generalizations about the Republican Party; he missed my sarcasm. When it dawned, he threw his head back and let out a thunderous baritone laugh, scrunching up his nose and shaking his head. By the time the mango sticky rice dessert came, I had hearts in my eyes.
Not wanting the date to end, we drove to the beach in Santa Monica, where we walked and held hands in the moonlight. We ranked our favorite albums and shared our beliefs about the world. That first night, we made a pact that regardless of whether or not the relationship worked out, we would still combine our DNA and have children, knowing that our genes would create superathletes. He believed we’d get rich with a son in the NFL. I didn’t want kids, but making this playful pact with Kip was easy. He was stupid-cute, and his imagining a future with me was flattering. He was the kind of guy you usually only see in romantic comedies.
After only a few, sweet kisses, I got back to my cousin Tina’s apartment at 3 a.m. and woke her up, feverishly announcing that I was going to marry Kip. My cousin groaned and rolled over, saying that she’d heard it from me before. (Which was true.) But one month after I arrived, I moved into Kip’s apartment. Just like that, the life I had envisioned in the Bay Area disappeared.
I’d arrived in Cali on the strength of a coin flip. After graduating, all I knew was that I didn’t want to go the fancy law firm route, even if one year’s salary at one of those places could have decimated my student loan debt. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to stomach all the golf, the money talk, and bullshit. I didn’t care about the cases those places litigated, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing the role I played in them, however small. Now that I knew the broke lawyer’s life was calling me, the only thing left to decide was whether to be a broke lawyer in New York City (so many friends, but winter) or somewhere in the state of California (no friends, but sunshine). Unable to choose, I resorted to chance: Heads, New York. Tails, California.
Cali won.
I settled on Oakland—centralized city life, plenty of liberals, hippies, queer folks, artists, and activists. After bland-ass Colorado, Black-ass Oakland would feel like the promised land.
Instead, I was nearly four hundred miles away in a 650-square-foot apartment in Pasadena with Kip. It might not have been what I’d planned, but what did that matter? We were blissfully happy.
Whenever we had small disagreements, he would apologize by writing me cute little songs. We had date nights in our apartment or on the roof, where he’d carry a table, chairs, candles, and speakers, and cover the ground with rose petals. When I had a disproportionate meltdown believing that a neighbor had stolen my computer and would sell it for parts, he laughingly reminded me that I was on hormonal birth control for the first time and perhaps the pills weren’t working with my body chemistry. He was right, and I was angry that he was right.
The next few years were filled with the growing pains of young love as we stumbled our way through the “real” world. Kip made eighth-grade English teacher money in an underfunded public school, and although I wanted to help pay the bills, I put off finding a legal job for as long as I could. Instead, I worked as an extra on film sets, a front-desk person at a spa, and as a receptionist at a gym, where men trying to flirt asked me if I was an actress or model.
“Nope!” I would reply brightly. “I’m a lawyer.”
Finally, I got a job at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. There it is, I thought with a stab of pride and a little dread. I’m finally a proper lawyer.
As the woman moving into Kip’s bachelor pad, I introduced him to the revolutionary concept of shower caddies and dish towels. There was no couch, just an IKEA-grade futon facing a disproportionately large flat-screen TV that swallowed the opposite wall. When he built a sound booth in our bedroom, leaving me with no space for my shoes, I moved out into my own apartment. Eventually, he bought us a town house, which we renovated along with his father, nailing floorboards down and screwing in light fixtures. We stumbled our way forward, getting a lot of love right, and getting a whole lot of relationship wrong. We kept going.
After three years, the inevitable and annoying questions from family and friends began. When would we get married? When would we start a family? We were the “right” age—both twenty-nine—and from the outside we were the perfect couple: young, gifted, and Black, a lawyer and a teacher, both in public service. However, we were two very different people who were starting to discover that we didn’t have the tools to negotiate a mutually agreed upon life.
Kip was a devout Christian and a homebody who preferred to spend Friday nights working on his music, grabbing dinner, and watching a movie. My ideal Friday nights were spent at concerts and socializing with fellow weirdos, twirling in the street, and letting yes lead the way. Although I too had a Christian upbringing, the Bible I kept—engraved and gifted to me by my parents on my eighteenth birthday—sat on my shelf alongside Maya Angelou, Hafiz, Osho, Carlos Castañeda, Eckhart Tolle, a biography of Jimi Hendrix, and Tantric Orgasm for Women. He dreamed of grandchildren running around us as we sat on a porch sipping lemonade. I dreamed of sipping Sauvignon Blanc in the Seychelles with him and my books. Despite our first-date pact to create superathlete offspring, the idea of raising children unnerved me and I communicated that, taking back my pledge early and often. It was clear we would not be able to form a cohesive life without some serious compromise. But we kept going.
When he asked me to marry him on the side of the 105, I grabbed the ring and instinctively sprinted down the freeway—laughing, crying, scared. We went home, cuddled in bed for a while, then called our families. I couldn’t stop staring at my pretty new yellow sapphire and conflict-free diamond ring through the tears of joy. I was going to marry my best friend. I should have listened to my body, which ran when he asked the question. The body always wins.
Sorting through my feelings confused me. I did want to wear a pair of hot-pink Badgley Mischka crystal-encrusted heels and a fancy dress someday. But I felt feverish and wanted to peel off my skin at the thought of a wedding. I struggled to understand why we needed to throw a massive party for friends and families to honor a commitment we’d only make to each other. The compromise was that we’d elope to Costa Rica and the Casa del Sol Resort. I went barefoot on the beach in a borrowed dress and a bouquet of yellow and orange Gerbera daisies that my mother insisted upon. No Badgley Mischkas for me this time.
One Sunday afternoon when making our bed three months after we came back from Costa Rica, I learned that Kip didn’t make the bed with a flat sheet. He preferred just the fitted sheet covering the mattress and a comforter. This was news to me, and I looked at him like he’d grown a snout. Would I have to live without a flat sheet for the rest of my life? Was I destined to a life of bacteria and skin cells absorbed directly into the comforter? What kind of life would that be? From there, my thoughts spiraled all the way out to my dreams of living in rural Japan, dancing in the falling cherry blossoms and drinking jasmine tea. Would I have to give all of that up? What other things would I have to compromise for the sake of merging my life with his? What other parts of me would have to die?
This innocuous tidbit threw me into a tailspin, unaware as I was that I was actually grieving my single life. Marriage was a mind fuck. I’d stare intently at him while he slept, trying to picture him as an old man. I couldn’t. I cried silent tears into the pillow. I wanted to make him happy and I wanted to be happy, but I didn’t know how to do both without losing myself in the process. I didn’t have the language for it, but the long shadow of loss was creeping over me.
Despite couples therapy, we struggled. Kip was patient, but in the end, we couldn’t figure it out. Six months after we stood across from one another on the beach, we agreed to separate. We had never filed the paperwork to register our marriage legally. When we fell apart, all that was required was for each of us to walk away.
The separation was excruciating, grim, and messy. At times it felt like my vital organs were shutting down. There was so much internalized failure to face, so many big questions I didn’t have answers to. Wasn’t this what I was supposed to want? Married at twenty-nine to a hot, successful, creative, beefy gentleman who loved the shit out of me and wanted a long life with me? How could I look such happiness in the face, turn, and run?
My family was gentle with Kip and me in our heartbreak. Nonetheless, I heard those old judgments bubble up from my subconscious and stare me in the face. You run hot and cold. You’re flighty. You eat men up and spit them out. You don’t know what you want. And you don’t even know what adult love—the “real” kind—looks like.
It took a while for it to be over with Kip. Our lives tangled in so many places, and each knot had to be undone by hand. The unraveling of a life. Deciding what to do with the custom furniture we’d built to fit the space—he kept it. Who would deal with the dozens of framed pictures of us on the dining room collage wall?—I did. The blender we got as a wedding gift—we fought over it. Our shared dreams—we trashed them.
When the relationship was finally over, I was gutted, and I landed on my youngest sister Aba’s couch for a few weeks. I spent my nights sobbing into a towel in the bathroom, hoping she wouldn’t hear. She granted me the dignity of pretending she didn’t. She had her own grief to bear; Kip had become like a brother to her.
There must be a word for the grief we experience over the life we thought we should have, events that never happened, stories that didn’t have the happy ending. At every step in our path, some possibilities die behind us while others bloom before us, and in every transition, even the joyful ones, there is grief. From maiden to mother. Single to married. Unemployed to entrepreneur. The old you dies; a new one is born. The grief is ongoing, and never-ending.
It turns out, you can grieve both a dream and an untold future. One where the beloved brother-in-law is still alive, or you never left your home country. The one where we got that perfect job, and one where we pose, smiling, for the holiday card next to our chosen partner year after year, hair growing grayer, and children growing bigger.
It didn’t matter, in the end, that married life wasn’t my dream. It was Cosmopolitan magazine’s. It belonged to the patriarchy and society. I was grieving the idea of a life that had never been mine, but still, I grieved. Cultural norms are like lead in our drinking water—you can be aware of their presence, but that doesn’t make you any less sick.
For years, I blamed myself for the dissolution of our marriage. Kip was as good as they get, and I was the one who hadn’t been strong enough to make it work. When I was offered a shot at the dream life, I was the one who had turned and fled down the freeway. The failure was mine, but the repercussions affected him deeply.
And yet now, more than fifteen years later, Kip and I no longer look like failure to me. We’re still good friends. We still share a AAA account. He can still type the words to one of his little songs in a text, and I’ll smile. He’s as beautiful, genuine, and earnest as when we met, plus some gray hairs in his locs and a lot more sneakers. It’s a joy watching the man he became after we split, even if that man isn’t mine. He was never mine to keep, as I was not his.
The risk of loving anything is to lose it. Even when love follows the traditional romantic narrative of “till death do us part,” eventually death arrives. It is painfully obvious and simple: love anyone, and one day your heart will break. Yet somehow humans choose to do it over and over again. Heartbreak itself is a death: the death of the relationship, the death of the person we are in the relationship, the death of a shared future. And with death comes grief. Grief is also the fertile soil from which we can be renewed.
That begs the question: When our hearts are broken open, what seedling of self can emerge more fortified in the aftermath? Because if a person could die from heartbreak, I would have died a hundred times by now. (Give or take.) And I would have also put myself back together stronger, richer, and indelibly marked by the price and payoffs of love.
In that moment when Kip held a ring glinting with promise in the freeway lights, my body was intelligent enough to know the truth of what I really wanted but could not admit. It told me to turn and run. It was only a matter of time before I was forced to accept that truth and learn to live with it. Many spend their lives fighting against what they know to be true, but most damning of all is when we fight against endings that are due to come, like death.
Using the keyless entry to Elena and Mike’s modest home in a Beverly Hills–adjacent neighborhood in Los Angeles, I grab the notepad by the door. The tasks have been outlined clearly by Elena. My first task is to take off my shoes. Next, I am to wash my hands in the bathroom off the living room to avoid bringing bacteria or viruses to Mike. Because of ALS, his ability to cough and clear mucus is severely compromised, and a common virus like a cold or the flu could kill him. After washing my hands and doubling up with hand sanitizer, I am to make myself known by standing in the doorway of the bedroom until he acknowledges me and invites me in. If he isn’t in the mood for a visitor, Elena warns, I’d know.
I met Elena three months before Mike died. She contacted me to provide additional respite support while she goes on an annual girls’ trip with her best friends from college. Mike insisted that she go, even though she does not want to leave her beloved’s side. My role is to visit for an hour each day, take stock of his disease and spirits, make sure the caregivers are doing their job, and to report back to Elena.
Mike and Elena are going it mostly alone. They have no children and moved to Los Angeles a year and a half after Mike’s diagnosis. Since Elena quit her job to care for Mike and they barely have friends, their circle only consists of the hospice doctors, nurses, and certified nursing assistants (CNAs), some of whom will be present twenty-four hours a day during Elena’s trip. To make herself feel better about leaving, Elena leaves a long list of instructions, including how to turn the television off. There are even instructions on how to compost egg shells—grind them down first so they decompose quicker. At the top of the legal notepad it says DO NOT ASK HIM ABOUT YESTERDAY.
I am familiar with ALS. My friend Richard’s father died from the disease years ago. ALS causes the death of the neurons that control the voluntary muscles. Most people with ALS slowly lose the ability to walk, talk, use their limbs, swallow, and breathe. The erosion eats away at the body, making it increasingly difficult to perform the most basic functions of life. Caregiving for someone with ALS is a race to meet the emotional demands of each new loss, causing a veritable jungle gym of grief and ancillary losses.
Lying in an adjustable medical bed in their bedroom with the blinds closed, Mike invites me closer by tipping up his scruffy salt-and-pepper chin while keeping his eyes on the silent television.
“Should I open the blinds?” I whisper, trying to confirm he is aware of my presence without startling him.
He barely shakes his head no, still not looking my way.
I am relieved. The blinds aren’t on my list, and Elena’s detailed instructions on everything have put the fear of Moses into me. I cross the threshold into the bedroom but stand close to the doorway.
Vials of liquid medications, empty IV tubes, Kleenex, and a pestle and mortar for grinding pills are displayed on the nightstand. Mike’s ability to project and communicate verbally are limited by the weakened muscles in his larynx, diaphragm, and throat. The television remote control lies just under his hand, ready to be deployed at any time.
He whispers, “What did she tell you about me?”
“Everything!” I respond with a laugh.
He chuckles weakly, still not looking at me. Then he cuts right to the chase. “She told you not to ask me about yesterday, right?”
I hesitate, unsure if saying yes would constitute a breach of confidence. Instead, I smile awkwardly, even though he isn’t looking at me. This is my default facial expression when I don’t know what to do, think, or say, insides boiling in social anxiety.
Mike continues, oblivious to my discomfort. “I know she did. Elena is worried every day.” He takes a labored and audible breath. “She asks me to lift my fingers and marks how close I came to yesterday’s mark. Like how you measure a kid against the wall in the kitchen every year.” He draws another ragged breath. “I hate it. But I know she is just scared and so I do it.” His eyes are fixed on the soundless television. “Do we have to do it while she is gone?”
I scan the list of instructions, flipping through four pages on the legal pad, plus the notes I made during my initial meeting with Elena. Despite her vigilance, Elena hadn’t mentioned this private measuring ritual. I don’t want to piss her off when she comes home, but I would have remembered something like that.
I respond tentatively. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Good.” His eyes remain on the silent television, a news show in which talking heads gesticulate wildly at each other and vie for attention. Since Mike opened the door to talk about yesterday, I walk through it: “So, what about yesterday do you think she is afraid of?”
“She is scared that every day I am one day closer to dying than I was the day before,” he says, staring blankly at the red-faced news anchors. Finally, he turns his head slowly to look at me. “We all are. But she can actually tell that I am getting closer when I can’t do the things I used to anymore. I gave up being angry about today because of yesterday a long time ago, but my wife is doing it her way. Every day is like a brand-new day for her.” With his weakened voice, I heard “Every day is like a brand-new death for her.” He’s not wrong either way. Each day is the death of the Mike from the day before. He’s making his peace at a different pace than Elena is.
During our first meeting, Elena, formerly a bookkeeper with shoulder-length graying hair and red-framed drugstore readers, showed me the spreadsheets she’d made to chart every facet of Mike’s care. Doctors, pharmacists, reactions, foods, timetables—you name it, Elena had a spreadsheet for it. Some part of me, I admit, shivered at the neatly tabbed rows. I’ve never met a spreadsheet I liked. But even though Elena was my total opposite in many ways, I spotted something too familiar to ignore behind those drugstore reading glasses.
I too had struggled for months, clinging to one dearly held belief at a time, in the face of a truth that felt just too big and too awful to accept. When my marriage with Kip dissolved, it didn’t happen in a blinding flash. It was a series of small losses, and each day brought a new reckoning. I might not have used a spreadsheet, but you can bet that I also measured the distance between yesterday’s truth and today’s. Each day, and each loss, brought with it a new spasm of grief.
In truth, Elena’s spreadsheets are an ingenious coping mechanism. She is controlling what she can. If she can’t control how far Mike can stretch his fingers each day, she can at least keep a detailed log. This is how Elena is managing her grief, by doubling down on what she does so well: marking, measuring, recording. They are a yardstick to mark her husband’s deterioration as well as the level of her daily loss.
Asking Mike about yesterday defeats Elena’s efforts to stay in the present with his disease. So she doesn’t ask; she measures. It might look rigid, but it works for her. And when caregivers find something that works for them so that they can keep taking care of the dying, everybody wins.
People with degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis and those who care for them often become reluctant experts in adaptability. In these conditions and many others, there is a gradual weakening and degeneration of the body, one system at a time. People who live with these diseases and those who care for them are forced to become masterful adapters. To adapt is central to the human experience. Humans are masters at navigating the unknown and adapting to new circumstances, even though we often do not give ourselves the credit. Change is the god that we must bow to.
Each new day that we get to wake up, we greet a reality that wages a war of attrition against our expectations. Life doesn’t go the way we want. Duh. Ideas fail. People change their minds. Governments get overthrown. Babies won’t nap. Psychedelic trips end with a potential for inpatient treatment. Our hearts get broken. We burn dinner. Tires go flat. Yet, we learn to adapt in the moment, even as we struggle and resist. Learning to adapt introduces us to the new self, time and time again. The new self is one we never imagined—someone who has integrated all that has come before.
When we arrive at this new place, we are able to say, “Today, I am here.” Starting sentences and thoughts with the word today grounds us in the present. “Today, my husband can no longer walk.” “Today, I can’t grip my coffee cup.” “Today, my best friend can’t stomach her favorite meal.” “Today, I am separated.” “Today, my father is dead.” Today is not without its grief.
I continue to visit Mike and Elena for the next three months until Mike dies. After our sticky beginning, we’ve grown close. During our visits when Elena turns her head or leaves the room Mike secretly lifts his finger for me and smiles weakly. It’s become our inside language to signal that Elena is keeping up her ritual. She’s never shared this private practice of hers with me and I’ve never revealed that I know. It endears me to her. I am also touched that Mike is allowing his wife to move at her own pace with his dying, as a part of her is dying with him. As expected, eventually he isn’t able to lift his finger any more.
When Elena calls to tell me that Mike has been diagnosed with pneumonia—a common occurrence for people with late-stage ALS—we both know that the end is near, especially since Mike has chosen not to treat it. Over the phone, she recites everything the doctor has said and the changes she’s made to her spreadsheets to include how many breaths he is taking a minute and how often he coughs. When the breaths slow considerably and Mike struggles to clear his airway, she sits with him until his respiratory function stops altogether. Mike is dead.
I visit with them later that day. Elena sits in the same chair she sat in during his illness with her laptop on her lap, but this time it is closed. The TV is off, and Mike is still in the bed, awaiting transport by the funeral home. She seems distant, in the shock of acute grief, the impossible having happened before her eyes. I gently take the laptop from her, set it down, and ask permission to take her hand. She lets me. Then she finally cries and I cry with her.
After Mike’s death, Elena struggles to adapt to her own new normal of having no one aside from herself to care for. For almost two years, her entire life has been focused on Mike’s care. She doesn’t have any more spreadsheets to update, and nothing outside of herself to control. We talk on and off about the tasks to wrap up his affairs, but Elena handled most of them while he was living. She sorely misses his presence beside her at night, as she slept in a bed right next to his hospital bed. Less than a year after Mike’s death, when all the chores are done, the hospital bed removed, his clothes given away and his sentimental items boxed, Elena dies of a heart attack. I believe she dies of a broken heart. Nothing left to live for.
In my work as a death doula, I journey with clients from their old self to their new self, even if their new self is the deathbed self. Understandably, people struggle to integrate their own impending mortality or the mortality of someone they love. To support them practically to ground in the now, I offer clients a practice I call “finding your feet.” When I’m with someone focused on the past or worried about the future, I encourage them to join me in the present, with a simple reminder about their feet. The mind can travel. The body is always right here. By bringing attention to the feet and thus into the body, either by enjoying a warm foot bath or simply placing our bare feet firmly on the earth and wiggling our toes, we can invite ourselves into the moment that we can utter these life-affirming words of adaptability: “Today, I am here.”
Kip was my first time learning what happens when you try to fight the truth you see in front of you. You wind up locked into an exhausting struggle against yourself, a struggle in which you can only ever lose. We must reckon with our truths daily. If only I could have learned this lesson just once. But like all of us, I would have to learn it again and again. Soon, I would start learning it with my so-called “career.”