What Happens When an Ex Dies?

What do you feel? Anger? Loss? Nausea? Release?

“I saw a photo of him in the hospital,” said Sonja. “It was in New Orleans. Just a few days ago.”

Paris was dead.

The large, charismatic musician had been a fixture in her life some years ago. He took money. A lot of it. Money Sonja has never had, but which, on so many occasions, she would give, lend and lose to those she loved. Trusted.

I can relate. I’ve done that for all my men. Pisses me off. We’re 55 and 67, respectively, and men have regularly emptied our bank accounts. Both of us have had to file for bankruptcy, for different reasons, but the men didn’t help.

At all.

We both hoped. Probably the most expensive emotion there is, hope.

Paris was dead. A tall, talented, substantial Black man, living in a city of fellow musicians where he had moved some time back. Laid low by his lifestyle, and like so many older Black men whose health was already tenuous, left dead by our Conditions.

At first, she was sick to her stomach. Three, then four days, she was emotionally sidelined. Sonja is in love, recently married. Why on earth would this even matter?

Because it does matter.

We talked about this, as we always do, as deep and longtime friends. Why would this be so important?

Some years back my ex-husband had a heart attack. Nearly killed him. I found out long after the fact. Same reaction. Holy shit.

My last BF, who just turned 51 in March, has remarkably poor eating habits for a man who considers himself an athlete. Lots and lots and lots and lots of donuts, sugar and carbs, not the good kinds. Rarely eats salads. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if he gets planted before I do.

How would I feel?

Probably nauseous. Angry. Frustrated. Deeply distressed.

Sonja and I walked through our reasoning. Why on earth does it still matter?

Sonja was married for years to a terribly abusive man. He’ll die before she does. No question. She said, “His sister will call me. I’ll need to go somewhere and throw up. I can’t get those years back.”

Why does that death matter so much? This is what we teased out yesterday afternoon, as the early spring sun warmed the day. I wondered if this was one reason why, back in March, I read another Medium article about how quarantine was not a justification for texting your ex.

While that really struck my funny bone, there is some deep truth underlying that compulsion to check in, to reconnect.

First: at one point we really loved these men. They etched their stories onto our souls, they caused us great hurt and harm but we loved them anyway. All that speaks to great longing for what we so badly wanted but could not have. In love with longing, to a degree. Perhaps to a very large degree.

Second: in each of the cases that Sonja and I discussed, things ended badly. There was no gracious parting. Plenty of animosity. The pain that she and I both felt- and continue to feel at a soul level-is that pain related to being unable to “fix” things. The lack of control, the being at the mercy of our feelings, and vulnerable to the constant hurts. Hurts that never completely resolve. Hurts that rise again with contact with that person, even at death. Hurts that cannot, will not, ever be released. Those hurts are fixed points in the constellations of our lives.

Third: We don’t get to be right about how they were wrong to treat us that way. I wonder how much this compulsion plays into our pain. I can only speak for myself. I allowed those men to hurt, take advantage of me, empty my bank accounts, be verbally abusive. Their absolute inability or brutish unwillingness to see what they did, the hurt they caused has a horrible habit of Velcroeing them to my emotional self forever in the need to Make Them SEE, Make Them FEEL, Force Them to Take Responsibility for the pain they caused. While I can’t speak for Sonja, I suspect that she shares this.

I allowed myself to have high hopes, to have unreasonable expectations (that he’d not be an abuser next time) and to continue to wear blinders.

Doesn’t matter that it’s impossible to force anyone to see anything, to accept responsibility for how they created hurt inside us, the need for it, the longing for some kind of acceptance on their part still exists. At some level, it’s almost as though we feel that they have no right to die on us without making amends. Leaving us holding the heavy bags of our resentment while they float off to their next adventure, scot-free.

Fourth: They are proof-positive that love does not heal all wounds. That simply loving someone can ultimately be meaningless. That in the greatest sense of the word, no matter how much we loved them, our love did not heal, or help. It most certainly did not heal all wounds, especially those inflicted by parents or previous lovers. What it did do was harm us. At some level, we’re not happy about how helpless we feel in the face of that terrible truth. We were never enough. Hurts to face that. We. Were. Never. Enough.

I felt the same way when my father died. He went to his deathbed claiming I still owed him money. That I was a loser. That he wasn’t an alcoholic.

No fixing that. No last minute, movie moment, deathbed reconciliation.

Last Sunday I was working, as I always do, in the very early hours. For some reason, and I am not going to explore those here, I touched on the link to my most recent ex’s Linked In profile. My Medium peep Kris Gage wrote a piece a while back about how our exes think about us. Ya think? We think about them. Of course we do.

I’ve been blocked.

For some reason, that really hurt. Rejection.

Then, come ON man. I had blocked him on Linked In, my email, my phone. He has a bad habit of circling back around, and in fact did precisely that last November on my Match.com account. He got a Medium account (he does that, he wants to read my stuff). If he did, he’d know how I felt. That would have been right painful reading. What on earth did I expect? Of course he retaliated. I’ve done the same thing on occasion. Blocking is just an online version of a hand to the face. Go. Away. I threw out all the rest of his clothing, his coats, what furniture was left. I was pretty pissed off.

But if I read an obituary?

Sonja said it best: “I’d probably go somewhere and throw up.”

I probably would, too.

It’s been since January 2019 since I saw the man. By far and away the most difficult, damaging, costly, hurtful connection of my life. I haven’t had sex since then. Having had my heart ripped out of my chest on the morning of my 66th birthday does not a grateful ex make. I’ve processed through that ending through my writing, through recriminations, through anger and harsh self-work and all the difficult and recurring passages that mark the loss of an intense ten-year connection that did far more harm than good.

Good riddance, in so many ways.

And yet. Were I to see his face against a hospital pillow, wan and thin, stuck with tubes?

I can only imagine. For facing the fact of his death, as Sonja had to do with Paris, means facing the death of all the dreams that rose around that person. There would never be that Big Conversation. The Big Understanding. The Big Reconciliation. The tears and acceptance and warmth that comes with mutual forgiveness. The ability to acknowledge our respective parts of a shattered dream.

Those things would never happen.

Yet all this rumination ignores the potential that our exes feel much the same way. Perhaps guilty for their part. Unable to admit, or accept that their love wasn’t enough for us either. Or perhaps that the sins of their fathers, which had taken root in their souls, had once again, laid to toxic waste yet another relationship. Each time they face the bathroom mirror, they also face the failures of What Could Have Been. Not all of them do. More, I would bet, than we give them credit. They only possess what power over us that we have handed them, and vice versa.

Perhaps what I have to face at the deepest level is the reality of Never. As long as the Ex is alive, there’s always that tiny chance. That minuscule sliver of maybe.The addiction to the notion of being able to finally fix things, to walk away happy, to walk away healed.

Not with Paris.

There’s a moment in the movie Dracula when Mina, in the grip of Dracula’s embrace, tells him to

“Take me away from all this Death.”

Dracula knows that in truth, all he can do is commit to her an eternal life of nothing but death. Her unwillingness to deal with the emotional pain leads her to make a terrible choice to commit herself to not only facing, but also delivering death until the end of time.

In facing the death of someone who once held the highest place in our hearts, we face our own limitations. Our own failures. Forever trying to fix, rewrite those hurts, to ask the other person to remove our pain, is for me the same decision Mina made. They cannot do that for us. And our desperate need for them to wipe the slate clean imprisons us forever.

None of those men can ease my pain. Nor could my father. Not only is that not their job, but they are/were consumed by their own. Perhaps, therein likes the key. To wish them godspeed on their next journey. To have the courage to thank them for sharing part of it with us. To never again hope for or expect any kind of “fix” for what cannot, could never be fixed. Made whole or right.

Things are right, just as they are.