We’re gathered around the long couch in my friend’s living room. It’s an unseasonably warm February day, but we’re inside, staring at the television. To my left is a table laden with three kinds of cake. To my right, a toddler bangs a chair with a plastic drum stick.
“Are we ready?” my friend asks.
No, I think. How can you ever be ready for this?
She hits play and the bar under the star-studded album art begins to move: We’re listening to a song written, produced, and recorded by my husband. The first single released after his death from a spontaneous hemorrhage in September.
Nothing can prepare you for losing your husband at the age of 35—or for the number of firsts that come after it.
Today is his birthday. It’s the first in over a decade that I’m not racing around trying to find the perfect present. The first I spend learning how to upload music to a digital distribution platform instead of fine-tuning surprise plans. My birthday is eight days later, and it will be the first I reach an age he didn’t. As I am learning, the year after losing a loved one is counted in firsts.
Listening to my husband’s voice, I’m transported to a train in Portugal, my head resting on his shoulder, both of us sniffling with whatever sickness we picked up on the plane to Lisbon. I don’t know it yet, but he’s planning to propose the next day.
“Blanket over our heads, we ride,” he sings through the television. “A northbound train on the coastal side.” The song is special to me for a number of reasons, but mostly because it’s one of the few times he used aspects from our personal lives in his lyrics. In my writing I use things he told me all the time. I hear so much of him when I read my novel, The Resemblance, released this past November, a year and two months after he died. There are lines designed to make him laugh, references only he would understand, characters he named, and stories he told me. The setting—Athens, Georgia—is where we first met, at the birthday party of a mutual friend. We almost missed each other. He was late, I was early, and the birthday boy was missing, so I left. To this day, I’m not sure what made me go back, but I did.
A week later he invited me for coffee and told me his dream of recording an album on his own from start to finish. I dreamed of becoming a professor, but wrote fiction in secret. In the almost 11 years we shared, he recorded hundreds of songs and I taught hundreds of students. And we were together for all of it.
I was there for his late nights building tracks and finding the perfect drum sound, the early mornings reading Dylan lyrics and the Romantic poets. We could be anywhere—on a date skewering pieces of sushi, in the bread aisle of the grocery store, hiking in the sun-soaked Shenandoah valley—and he’d pull out his phone to record a melody idea. So when he began his most recent project, I could look back and see it as a culmination of the hours spent, the knowledge acquired, his discipline, and determination. And I was proud of his achievement, because of all that I witnessed.
He did the same for me. When we met, I was applying to PhD programs across the country. He saw me accept a position, write a dissertation, graduate, and start my career. It was my husband who encouraged me to take my creative writing seriously. He was there when I finished the first draft of my manuscript, when I got my agent, and when my novel found a home.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what a gift it is to share your life with another person and how part of that gift is bearing witness—that privilege of seeing, accepting, and supporting someone for who they are at the time of their life when you know them. I still see my husband as the cuffed-jeans-wearing 24 year old in Athens teaching himself audio production. Him at 26 showing up every day at a studio until the head engineer gave him the keys. Him at 28 with television placements. Him at 33 in Portugal down on one knee. I continue to hold all these images of him. But he can no longer do the same for me.
Now I’m finishing both our projects. In the mornings, I write and review manuscript edits, and in the afternoons, I sort through lyrics, melody ideas, and audio tracks. A process my collaborator alternatively compares to a treasure hunt and an archeological dig, and one we both agree makes us feel closer to my husband. Because for me, bearing witness to his life doesn’t end with his death.
He wasn’t there when I received the mock-ups of my book cover. When the first reviews were posted. He wasn’t there when it was published. And he’ll never hold the book in his hands. When the box of my advance reader copies arrived, it was my mother—not my husband—who videotaped me opening it. In the recording, I hold the book up to the camera. “I’m so excited,” I say, smiling to hide the way my voice catches.
“I felt like a fraud,” I told my therapist the next day.
Because I wasn’t excited. Publishing the novel was a lifelong dream, but every milestone in the process was another reminder that my husband wasn’t there to share it, that our things were in storage, that I lived everywhere and nowhere because the life we built together no longer existed. And without him, I wasn’t sure if any of it mattered.
When my therapist prompted me to reflect on opening the box, I remembered my husband when my academic book came out three years earlier. I saw the cupcakes he bought with multi-colored frosting. And then the layers of s’mores-flavored cake from our wedding. Because when he was alive, we celebrated everything. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Article publications. Song releases.
“Oh, here we are again,” his voice echoes through my friend’s living room. “Our moment in the sun.”
When the song fades, everyone’s eyes are misty.
“I’m so proud of him,” I say.
When I opened the box of my books, my mother says: “He’d be proud of you, too.”
So, I try to remind myself that the book exists because my husband did. It’s proof of his faith in me, of many long walks, and even longer conversations. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t shown up twice to the same birthday party. If he hadn’t invited me to coffee. The book and his songs are proof of our journey together, of second chances, spontaneous moments, and the wonderful but all too short slice of eternity we witnessed.
Because what is literature and music other than acts of love that we share with others? And in loving and creating, we make life a little easier for one another. My husband knew that. And I see the impact of his life carried on through his songs, in strangers who write to me how my husband encouraged them, friends who try to live more like he did, and family who find solace in his music. So, although it may be painful, I hope that with each book and song release, I’ll find a way to celebrate. Because I’m beginning to think that celebration is its own form of bearing witness.
