I look up and make a bargain with the sky: I’ll write this LinkedIn ad for my job if Ben can come back to life for thirty, maybe forty seconds and rest his forehead against mine.
˜
He doesn’t come back to life, but at night between wake and sleep, he appears in my mind’s eye, a little bit see-through. He’s wearing black, as he did in life. He’s not here to hang out—he’s concerned with my heart. Sometimes he holds it, hands open, as if it was a baby bird. Sometimes he rubs what looks like protective ointment on it. It feels good.
I figure I’m making it all up. I’ve been a wreck since he died—my appetite is erratic, my gait agitated, my posture defeated. So, sure—my psyche is probably conjuring him. But I welcome the visions because they soothe me.
Once I drop my guard and stop judging, things get serious.
Ben hooks our hearts together by jumper cables or an umbilical cord, maybe. I feel it more than I see it. This happens for several nights in a row, and, the mornings after, I wake up feeling stronger, refreshed.
On a night when I’m grieving Ben particularly hard, I feel him behind me. He reaches his hand in through my shoulder blades, pulls my heart out with both hands, and tucks it inside his chest, close to his.
It’s not exactly a fantasy to have my heart ripped out of my body and put into a dead man’s. Yet the night that happens, I calm down. It’s a relief to have my heart in his protection.
˜
It’s embarrassing to admit: in my forty-two years, my own heart had never been a priority, for me or anyone else. That it needed to heal was obvious—before Ben, my ex had proposed to me, bought a house with me, and gotten me pregnant after years of what felt like a healthy, loving relationship. Annie, I love you, he had engraved on the inside of the engagement ring. I trusted him more than anyone else on Earth. When we lost our baby nearly halfway through the pregnancy, he spun on his heel, declaring that he’d been unhappy for years, that he hated his life and it was my fault, that our baby wasn’t his, only mine. It was a stunning act of cowardice, one that still has me reeling.
I scrambled to reassemble my life—I switched careers, bought him out of our house, tried to keep myself from skidding out. I did a lot of therapy, but it was mostly spent trying to make sense of what had happened, not addressing my heart. Not that I had any kind of roadmap for heart-healing anyway. Less than a year after he left, around the time that I might’ve been digging deeper in my healing, my mom got diagnosed with cancer that had already metastasized to several major organs. This was just two and a half years after my dad died of dementia.
I braced for another difficult season.
˜
My mom’s cancer was small-cell lung, but the organ that worried her doctors the most was her brain. Approximately seventy-five brain tumors and lesions lurked, threatening to disrupt her cognition at any moment. Ben and I met about a month into her diagnosis. After only a few weeks of radiation, the seventy-five tumors and lesions on her brain became just three.
But her cancer was everywhere: the list of organs it had invaded was so long that we didn’t even keep track of them. Her end was coming, one way or another, but it was a nice moment—some relief; some hope.
A week later, once I was back in Ohio, Ben picked me up for dinner. As we were getting into his car, he asked me, in his slightly socially awkward way, Do you think there was some sort of energy transfer when you were there with her?
He was implying that my mere presence had shrunken her tumors. I laughed it off, but the question stuck with me. For a year, it sat as the sincerest compliment I’d ever gotten.
My ex-fiancé, who left after we lost our baby, called me the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen all the time. He told me I was a balm on his soul once, twice a month, easily. Rapunzel, he would joke, when I took my long hair out of a bun. When he proposed, he got down on his knee by our fireplace and asked me to be his family.
I would receive these compliments, and I believed him, though now I understand that at least some of them were slow-release love bombs. And words of affirmation just aren’t my love language.
When Ben got diagnosed, he came to my house, manic, exhausted and terrified. We talked in circles for maybe an hour. Then he put his head in my lap and finally relaxed. That became—and remains—the sincerest compliment I’ve ever gotten.
˜
We’re not compatible, I said after nine months of dating Ben. We don’t want similar enough futures.
I was clear on the decision to break up, but it was sad, because he was so lovely and intelligent, such a good man, and I was so attracted to him. But I felt that we didn’t have a future, and I didn’t want to waste his time or my own.
I expected our breakup to be the end of any connection (while we were dating, he had told me how poorly he handled rejection). It would be tricky, since we lived blocks away and bumped into each other regularly.
We had exchanged love while we were dating, of course. It felt straightforward and soothing—the way he held my hand at the farmer’s market and used the grip to direct us, so we had no tedious back and forth about which stall to visit next; how we would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night reaching for each other; the speed and confidence with which he bought a plane ticket to meet my mom in New Jersey when, six weeks after we met, it became clear that she would die soon.
What surprised me was how that love expanded and solidified when we broke up. Reader, I need you to know that I am not the type of woman who fucks around with a man she has decided not to spend her life with. But the breakup itself was quite beautiful: we said I love you for the first time; we acknowledged what a great partner the other was, and it was sincere. Neither one of us wanted the other to feel badly, and that in and of itself was beautiful. But what struck me the most was that he managed it. Told me exactly what he would tell his son; how and when I should reach out to the young man. Determined a timeline for us to transition from romance to friendship.
These labors seemed to me a great kindness—I had initiated the breakup, yet he was doing the work of the details. Not only that, but he didn’t villainize me. He would be alone now, have to begin again, but he didn’t fault me. It was a revelation: feeling safe and sovereign during a breakup.
A week later, we began talking again. After another week, we took a walk. Then it was dinner. Then a hike. My heart was healing and I could feel it—like a pulled muscle dipped into a hot tub. The way my ex left me had broken my heart, and now the fact that Ben and I had separated but didn’t leave each other was healing it.
By the time he started having stomach issues in June, the friendship was cemented. Whatever we had was real, and that was a relief. We talked every day. He figured he had IBS, which ran in his family. He was a young, fit forty-eight. Neither of us was terribly worried.
Ben dies on November 13th—just three months and one day after his initial diagnosis—and by early December, the dread arrives to my psyche with undeniable clarity: I cannot believe I have to live the rest of my life on Earth without him.
We say people “get” cancer, but really it comes to get them, ushers them out of their body, cell by cell. Ben’s cancer wasted him quickly, like my mother’s had done to her. His cancer was rare but treatable; there were multiple miracle drugs; he could swallow a simple pill and not have to submit to intravenous chemotherapy. His oncologist told us the typical trajectory for people in his position: you get your life back within two weeks of starting the chemo pill.
“The last guy couldn’t even stay awake during his appointment,” she said. “Two weeks later, he was back at it, coaching his son’s football team.”
If the first chemo pill didn’t work, he could just move on to the second. They would drain the fluid from his belly. He would get his strength back, begin eating, be able to move comfortably.
I held hope until the infuriating end, the way I had with my pregnancy, the way I had with the prospect of trying to conceive again after a late-term loss, the way I had with my relationship, the way I had in my mother’s doctor’s office when he told us the radiation had eviscerated seventy-two tumors inside her tiny head.
I realize my problem: I can always see the finish line, shiny and bright, but no one else can.
So: the misery of living without Ben stalks me like a pride of lions taking down a giraffe, and by January, I become so fatigued that I dare cancer to come get me. I’ve been making big mistakes at work. I’ve completely given up on cooking. Simple chores exhaust me. I’m exclusively attracted to a dead man.
Cancer doesn’t seem so bad. A few months of pain, some hospital-grade heroin, then I will be the weightless one, and everyone else can suffer through the slide decks and the small talk.
My family has just about every disease you can think of: cancer of the lung, breast, ovary, blood, and liver; neurodegenerative diseases that make your toes curl; the lucky ones’ hearts burst and are dead by the time the ambulance arrives.
Turn on, I will my bad genes. Multiply, I urge cancerous cells.
˜
Winter drags on and I don’t even catch a cold.
Ben doesn’t come back to life, so I don’t get to feel his forehead against mine, but I write the LinkedIn ad anyway. It’s gobbledygook. I completely lose control of the Google doc where the draft lives—eight different colleagues fuss over the language, erasing what I’ve written and replacing it with AI-generated versions.
This is in late January—nine, ten weeks after Ben dies. I feel afflicted; every day the sun has the gall to rise is an insult to my grief.
I’m just supposed to write LinkedIn ads like nothing happened? I seethe at my to-do list. Slack notifications make my skin crawl. Food rots in my fridge. I cancel plans left and right. Afternoon rolls around and it’s anybody’s guess if I’ve eaten.
It’s around this time that it occurs to me what’s happening—I can feel and sometimes see Ben so clearly, even though he’s dead. It somehow became a commonplace part of my life. I should write it down.
It comes out easy.
The facts are simple: Ben comes to me when I’m in pain and holds my heart. I can’t hear his voice, but he sends me messages in pictures: he holds his hands up to say take it slow when I fret over how often to reach out to his son. When I wring my hands over a regret—kissing him on the forehead and not the lips when he was sick, and we were broken up—he shows me his hands turning a page as if to say we can have something so much cooler. His face appears, big as a basketball, and he holds my face in his hologram hands on days when I burst into tears remembering some throwaway kindness.
These things are happening, whether anyone believes them or not, myself included.
And that’s when it occurs to me: I only fuss over language—the way we did in the Google doc with the LinkedIn ad—when I’m trying to say something that just doesn’t matter.
˜
The dogwood on my tree lawn is in bloom when my newfound honesty with myself yields another realization: there’s no truth-teller like death to show you what a relationship really is. I would burn my house down if it meant I could smell Ben’s skin one more time; I sob in my kitchen knowing I will never hold his hand again. All I have is his invisible love. But even that overwhelms me.
I languish on my couch and consider my future. I’m either going insane, or, if the internet mystics are right, I’m having my spiritual awakening. Maybe I’ve been bread-crumbed my whole life—that’s plausible. Or maybe real love is literally multi-dimensional; secure attachments know no dimensions. Trust transcends the body.
Ben didn’t want to extract anything from me. Not when we were boyfriend and girlfriend; not when we broke up; not when he was dying. That feeling of love, from such an unexpected source, and then losing it, catapulted me into a new spiritual reality. I had no defense against it. It was the first time in my life a man I was romantically involved with wasn’t draining me or using me in some way. We shared energy, and that was enough. We are still sharing energy, even though all that’s left of him on Earth are the ashes on his son’s mantle.
˜
The first night Ben was in the hospital, six days before he died, I stayed overnight with him. I held a bucket as he gagged. After he was done, I wanted to rub his back or hold him in some way. But he had lost fifty pounds from his already slender frame and it hurt him to be touched.
In that moment, when he finished gagging, I realized that I would never hold him or be held by him again, and I burst into tears. He took my hand and began to massage it with his. He was so weak that it hurt him even to hold hands. But he did it anyway—held my hand and tried to massage it.
Reader, I had a baby but he was dead and I was doped into oblivion; I listened to his father deny and disown all the love we’d shared just to get away from the pain, watched him strew his things on my front lawn after I boxed them up for him, my soul glitching and trying to re-orient itself like a busted GPS; I have said maybe fifteen, twenty-thousand Our Fathers and Hail Mary’s; I watched my father’s brain atrophy, witnessed him forget everything he ever knew, including my name and who I was to him; I sat cross-legged at my mother’s head and let her hand drop from mine as she drew her last arduous breaths—nothing I have ever experienced in this lifetime was holier than the touch of Ben’s hand in the middle of that night, this dying man I had dated for a measly nine months, trying to ease my pain through his touch.
˜
When my fiancé left me, he did it suddenly. It was like he ripped off a mask. He laughed at me while I cried. All the kindness that he showed me over those years was rendered null by his callousness when he left. After he left me, I realized, with a kind of dull horror, that I’d never fantasized about our future together, despite agreeing to marry him and carrying his baby.
˜
But I have lots of fantasies about Ben: he gets the medicine earlier, gets better. Some enormous medical advancement is made soon after and his recovery is complete. Another: we meet in our youth in an alternate universe and spend our entire lives together.
Not a single one of my fantasies involves him dead and me alive.
That’s how I know. That I’m meant to receive these communications from him, even when I don’t like what he has to say. Even when it’s boring or not actionable.
By the time Spring is in full expression, I begin to lose my appetite for the fantasies. They’re just too sad.
Only one remains. It goes like this:
Something is killing me. I’m a hundred and my organs are failing, or it’s next week and I’m in Target with a mass shooter. Ben hovers on the horizon. He’s a little bit see-through and wearing all black, like he did in life. He’s come to get me.
In this fantasy, I’ve forgiven my baby’s father so completely that his soul has been neutralized in the universe. He can never hurt me again. Our vibrations are so distinct, we’ll probably never even incarnate on the same planet again.
In his left arm, Ben cradles my baby. With his right, he reaches out to me.
END
Annie McGreevy received her MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University in 2010. She is the author of the novella Ciao, Suerte, from Nouvella Books, and her writing has appeared in The Portland Review, Electric Literature, STORY magazine, Shouts and Murmurs, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. After teaching writing at the university level for nearly fifteen years, she is now a full-time writer and editor in tech.