I Lost My Husband When I Was Just 35. He Left Me With An Inheritance I Had Never Imagined.

In a dimly lit Italian restaurant, not long after we received the terminal diagnosis for their son, I told my in-laws, Brian and Carol, that when Erik died, I couldn’t imagine being family anymore.  

We’d already been through so much. At 35, I wasn’t supposed to lose my husband to a rare liver cancer or spend midnights in the antiseptic hush of his hospital room. Instead, I should have been eating tubs of ice cream with him at midnight, while carrying our first child. Or arguing over which shade of white we should paint our bathroom. 

Any chance of salvaging my happiness, I thought, would require a clean break from his memory, including his family.,

Brian’s kind face was framed by a full sweep of silver hair, a young mop-top John Lennon meets the older, wiser Sam Waterston. When he looked up from his plate of pasta, his warm eyes flooded with tears. “I understand,” was all he said. 

But when Erik died a few months later, I found myself craving the comfort of his parents. Grief left me disoriented and drafted into roles I never wanted: widow, burial coordinator, memorial planner, and reluctant executor. I needed the ease with which we flowed, developed from months in hospitals together, trading off vending machine visits and coffee runs. I trusted their patience with me, after dialing them into countless doctor appointments followed by hours debating impossible medical decisions. Most of all, their presence offered a safety I’d thought belonged only to biology. 

When the dust finally settled and I tried to resume some semblance of a daily rhythm, COVID-19 hit. I left Chicago, where Erik and I had lived, for Los Angeles, but Brian and Carol stayed close; we spoke nearly every day. At first, the calls were survival, but, slowly, happier moments returned: my nieces in Christmas jammies, the release of a new indie rock album, and rainbows that kept showing up when we felt Erik nearby. 

When I was ready to “get back out there,” I had Carol on speed dial, and she became my unofficial dating coach, gamely reviewing Bumble lineups and post-date reports. She knew the “before” me and “after” me, and so I trusted her intuition about the kind of love that would fit. I grew to rely on her empathetic advice and soft pragmatism, but I worried that it might hurt her to hear about other men, that I was asking too much. She kept answering anyway — steady, eager to support me —  while I navigated the erratic path to rebuilding. 

Nearly three years after Erik died, when Brian and Carol invited me to a family friend’s wedding in Napa Valley, I knew that I’d drop everything to go. I was eager to see them and felt relaxed the moment we checked in at the hotel for the weekend. At the welcome cocktail, we did the usual circuit, introducing ourselves and scanning for familiar faces. 

In my floral cocktail dress and heels, it was like any night out together. But each new conversation snagged when a stranger asked whether I was their daughter — and, if not, how we were related. We stumbled over our words, wary to drop the “death” bomb into the conversation, but not entirely accustomed to fibbing about our relationship. 

After the event, we found a farm-to-table place — chichi and candlelit — and sat down. All through the meal, I wanted to talk about us and what we were to each other now. I kept replaying that dinner years earlier when I told them I might not be family after Erik died, a memory that now turned my stomach.