My Husband Died. Four Months Later, I Started Dating Again

Things didn’t work out with my dead husband’s doppelgänger. Nor did they last with the guy who got squeamish every time I brought up death. I tried seeing a Jaime, who pronounced his name the same way my Jamie did. That was weird too. I went on dates with a lawyer, a sculptor, and an adjunct professor. I even tried a long-distance romance, with a widower whose wife had died just a month before Jamie did. That had promise, but there was ultimately too much sadness between the two of us.

The truth is that I wasn’t that emotionally invested in whether or not those relationships worked out. I was too heartbroken for that. I told myself that none of these men could compare to Jamie, that I’d never be as happy as I once was. All of this, of course, was unfair to my companions. I considered dating a distraction from the present, not a promise for the future.

Then I met Billy.

Billy and I met at a talk I gave about—wait for it—losing Jamie. He was performing music at the same event, and we connected online afterward as friends. I was a few weeks away from the one-year anniversary of Jamie’s death, and Billy, unbeknownst to both of us, was a few months away from divorce.

As we worked through our individual losses, we would share bits and pieces of our pain online. We commented on each other’s Instagram Stories, noting how much we appreciated someone else being vulnerable instead of posting only the surface-level, feel-good things that tend to populate social media. Eventually we decided to meet for coffee.

The coffee date led to a long walk, which led to a second date, which led to a third date, which led to our first kiss. We took things slow and frequently checked in to make sure we both felt comfortable. As our relationship progressed, we were forced to face a difficult truth: Opening our hearts to someone new meant opening ourselves to the possibility of loss all over again.

Billy and I have been partners for more than a year now. We live together, in the house that Jamie and I once lived in, and we’re learning endless lessons about what it means to love someone who has deeply loved someone else. Although Billy’s grief is different from mine; he has a marriage to mourn too. Like me, he has to contend with a past that was once full of promise, and a future that will never be.