Dear Polly,
This the second time I’ve written anything in many years. The first time was about a month ago, when I tried to squeeze my entire life story into a single paragraph on a therapy clinic’s intake form. My husband and I were married five months ago. A lot of my family couldn’t make it to the wedding, most notably my older brother, who reported to county jail on the morning before we walked down the aisle. When I finally did get to see my brother, just after Thanksgiving, it was at his funeral. He died of alcoholism a few days before his birthday. The proximity of these two events — our marriage and the death of my closest sibling — has had the effect of blurring the lines between grief and the “marital adjustment period,” after a year of family drama and mind-numbing, reluctant wedding planning.
As an atheist, I wanted to get hitched at the courthouse, but my husband wanted a religious wedding with a big reception, and I relented out of respect for his traditions. I remember telling my brother about the wedding. We got into an argument about who he could invite. I think about this call with him a lot, and how things might have been different. Maybe he wouldn’t have been as depressed if I had let him bring whoever he wanted; maybe he would have been motivated to get help to ensure he’d be at the wedding, and he might still be alive now (but probably not). The internet says these thoughts are part of the “bargaining” phase of grief, but knowing that doesn’t make them stop.
My memories about our wedding are inseparable from my memories of my brother’s funeral. His absence at the wedding wore on my heart that day. I cried that morning and felt sad looking out over my other half-siblings, fair-weather friends, aloof parents and in-laws, and drunk husband who couldn’t be lured away from his even more intoxicated groomsmen all night. No matter how many drinks I had myself, I felt numb and couldn’t enjoy myself while worrying about all of the DIY details.
I was also glad that I knew where my brother was, and that I knew he was sober — at least he was safe from himself in jail. My parents are scatterbrained, secular baby-boomers with few family traditions and no aptitude for modern technology, and my other siblings are distant and self-absorbed, so after planning the bulk of our wedding, it was then up to me to plan my brother’s viewing and memorial service, write his obituary, field questions from friends and family, make a photo board, and buy cheese platters at Costco. I had to remind my husband that we needed a cat-sitter while we were both out of state for the funeral. Meanwhile, a friend asked if I could still perform in a show we had booked that weekend, and my father convinced me to scoop out some of my brother’s ashes into an old makeup bottle for his estranged alcoholic girlfriend. I became bitter and hopeless in the face of other people’s incompetence, selfishness, and inability to grasp the weight and significance life events such as marriage or death.
When I returned home, after four days of bereavement leave, my husband jumped back into his 60-hour workweek without taking a day off. Most of my evenings were spent alone, sobbing, clutching my phone but calling no one, and standing in the hallway like a zombie in our dark, cold apartment. I Googled things like “Do people really have friends?” and “Is everyone afraid of my grief?” No one in my family checked in to distract or comfort me, and friends I saw at work couldn’t be convinced to visit me at home where I might be safe to shed a tear on their shoulder without embarrassment. All I wanted was someone who would give me permission to be real with them without having to travel to a church or after-hours support group in the middle of winter, but the thought of asking for these things felt selfish and entitled. The fact that no one would take it upon themselves to extend an unsolicited caring gesture of friendship or familial concern left me simultaneously disillusioned and disgusted with myself for wallowing in self-pity. By conventional standards, one would consider me a popular person — a former model and sometime performer with flattering Google results and a successful career — but now I was a cliché whose entourage turned out to be comprised of vapid, indifferent acquaintances. After a few weeks, I felt confident enough to host a New Year’s Eve party, and that night I had to ask my husband kindly not to finish the fourth drink that he was spilling all over the floor, reminding him how my brother died.
Then I got angry. To be fair, I had been angry the whole time, but for some reason it all came out after I asked my husband if he felt like spearheading dinner some time and he described his disinterest in cooking. In general, my husband is objectively a very kind and sentimental person, but I know now that he is not thoughtful and probably never will be. I let out a wail and sobbed something about how no one does anything just to be nice anymore, and then lectured him about how spouses who don’t like to cook subconsciously just want a maternal caregiver to take for granted for the rest of their lives. I recalled the last time I blew up at him, just after the wedding. I had asked him why he didn’t help me plan anything; why he took more time and spent more money for his bachelor party than he did for our honeymoon, and why he didn’t try harder to spend time with me on our wedding day. He gave me a sullen hug.
I’ve painted this picture of general dysfunction, strangely, to provide context for the main problem I seek advice about: We haven’t had sex since the week before my brother died, and I think our lack of intimacy is at once a cause and symptom of my prolonged grief. I called a friend in tears on my husband’s birthday, terrified that I would need to pretend to feel happy in order to let him have a good time, and thinking that having sex was the only way to prove to him (and myself) that I’m “getting better,” but that all I could think about was death and dying. She told me that it’s normal to feel vulnerable, which I do, but I also feel contempt. When we make out, a dull anxiety washes over me, my heart pounds and I choke up at the thought that he’s expecting or hoping it will finally lead to sex, sensing an eagerness and impatience in his body language — I pull away and then sense his disappointment. We’ve talked about it briefly, and by that I mean that I’ve waited until the lights were out to say that I’m not ready yet, following up with, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me!” and ugly-crying myself to sleep. He is understanding, and we mostly just cuddle at night now. He bought me flowers and chocolate for Valentine’s Day and I’ve tried to cheer myself up by self-caring with haircuts, mani-pedis, facials, and massages, hoping that I can coax myself into feeling sexy enough to do the deed again one day.
In a post-group-therapy daze, I recently impulsively said yes to getting drinks with a good-looking stranger who approached me on the subway platform. It felt good to have a superficial conversation and be lusted over by someone who didn’t know me, or know that my brother had just died. I told him I was married, which confused and maybe enticed him. I wasn’t attracted to him, and won’t be meeting with him again, but it was an odd respite from my problems. Lucky for me, this stranger turned out to be a nice guy who probably thought he’d met a real manic-pixie dream girl, but the encounter feels like a sign that something strange and dark is brewing inside me, or like my life has become a watered-down Terrence Malick film.
I fear that grief and contempt are destroying my marriage before it’s even had a chance. I feel like someone on the edge of insanity, unable to conquer the many barriers to healing that lay before me. Before all of this, I wanted to start a family with my husband. Now, when I see children and yearn for one of my own, I think to myself, “You know that you have to have sex to have babies, right?” and am flooded with tears as I think of how I have no one to rely on for support if I ever became pregnant, how I’d need to initiate an adult conversation and spell out every lifestyle change that’s expected of a father-to-be to my apparently clueless husband. My thoughts wander to images of my fictional children growing up in a broken household, becoming homeless drug addicts, dying of an overdose, a drunken car accident, or a suicide, and of me becoming my own mother — traumatized, constantly tidying, and bouncing between relationships until settling into a sheltered monotony of middle-age. I’m afraid of re-creating the kind of cycle that destroyed my brother, and his death has made me fixate on my husband’s every flaw, bad habit, and annoying tendency as I keep hoping he’ll prove to me that I married the right person by acting like a good friend rather than a friendly roommate.
How can I untangle my relationship from my web of family baggage? How do I salvage what’s left of our first year of marriage? How do I forgive everyone, and myself, for not being picture-perfect examples of reliability (and should I)? Am I no longer in love, or is my capacity to love just imprisoned by my grief and anger? No one in my world seems brave enough to help me unpack these questions, and every psychiatrist in NYC appears to be booked.
Sincerely,
Wait-Listed