5. "I'll Have Bratwurst With That Spaghetti"

If you have ever seen the film Mostly Martha, you have a hint of what our life together would be, mine and Mario’s. First, we left that night from the tapas bar, warmed by good wine and good company.

He was taller and younger than I expected. I was smaller and…more brunette. Maybe a better comparison would have been to say that he was of a more Italian temperament, and I was more Teutonic.

We vowed to meet again, as soon as it was convenient. I hoped that he would go away comforted. I liked him.
Our second meeting took us to a local restaurant that was sired upon potential. It was an Italian restaurant that wanted to be truly, madly authentic in a city of meatballs and marinara.

The food we had was good – if esoteric for the community. What I remember is sitting out on the patio, an awning over our heads to keep us dry as a spring storm raged. No one out there but us two, cosseted by the moist air, bathed in candlelight.

More than anything, it was warm and golden. An entwining of spirits as we shared more, bit by bit.

One of the things you lose when the Great Love of your life dies is the couple culture you have nurtured together. It doesn’t matter whether you believe the spirit goes to a better place or becomes a trumped-up version of road kill. The culture that you shared – the patois that defined your special relationship – is gone. No one ever quite gets it in the same way.
Mario and I weren’t intending to start a couple culture of our own. But the passion of our losses propelled us. We began to speak more of “them.” We began to share them. Their habits. Their sense of humor. Their ways of sharing.

I understood why Mario loved Isabel. She adored him. Pure and simple. She accepted him. Without reservation. Her rhythms fit with his.

Take driving. Mario was quite an offensive-defensive driver, seasoned by bouts on the roads of Italy. Back in the States, he would do things like drift over toward the line between lanes on the freeway to “push back” a cell-phone-wielding soccer mom in a bloated SUV who was straying toward his space. He would drive fast, eyes red and flaming, as he passed the incompetent knuckleheads around him. He was a white Volvo with attitude.

Izzy, in her serenity, called it “Idiot-Watching With Mario.”
Gregory just liked to drive fast. Fast and hard. He had a quasi-sports-car 5-speed, nerves of steel, and was Cool Hand Luke under fire.

He refused to wear a seatbelt until my daughter Helena challenged him on it. With the same assertion and directness of character that he displayed, she told him, “I want you to put on your seatbelt. Now.”

She was 7. And, to my amazement, Gregory put on his seatbelt then and there, and put it on ever after, whether she was in the car or not. Something between them connected.

No matter how much Gregory had had to drink (and he drank as hard as he drove), no matter how far we were from home, I always had faith that he would get us back home in one piece.

When I went “Idiot Watching With Mario,” I sometimes cringed and gasped at Mario’s moves. I chewed on him for his seemingly wild antics. My breath would catch, and I’d grab the door-handle when he came close to a car in the next lane.

In time, I came to accept his Italian, quasi-madman ways on the road. But it was never the same as when Gregory was driving.

For whatever reason, I could not make Mario as perfect and right as Izzy had made him. Or as perfect and right as I made Gregory.

But still, it was a beginning. Our beginning.

4. The "Never" Mantra

It’s funny, but I can’t remember exactly what Mario and I talked about that first night. I know we laughed at our mutual wrong expectations: He thought I was a tall blonde, and I thought he was an older, Ricardo Montalban type. But it seemed clear we would be friends. Or, at least, partners. You know, in the Dead Mates Society.

We were not at a loss for words. But people sometimes wonder: What do you say to a person who’s just lost someone?

I used to be one of those people – before my mother died, the first “major” loss of my life. I avoided and didn’t say anything. This is about as wrongheaded as it gets.

It’s always important to honor where a person is with their grief – they may or may not want to open up or spill their guts to you. But the acknowledgment is important.

I will never forget when I retuned to work after Gregory died and a coworker approached me. Bob was not someone I knew well, but offered simply: “I’m so sorry about your loss.” I cannot tell you how much it meant to hear those words.

As flip as I might have sounded in my first post – I am a smartass at heart – I knew that my meeting with Mario was no date. And I genuinely wanted to reach out to him. I really could feel his pain, especially the way it consumes you in those initial weeks and months.

More than anything, grieving requires the willingness to accept feelings as they surface – whatever they may be, from anger at the person who has died to heightened sexual desire. You have to give yourself room and time to experience and process them all, rational or not.

One of the first ways Mario dealt with the rush of feelings was to jog. He told me that he often worked on his grief when he ran, talking to Isabel and crying along the way. By the time he’d get home, the tears would have blended into sweat.

It can take a while to move from the initial shock to grieving. On the night I learned of Gregory’s death, I don’t remember exactly when I started to cry. But very late, tiny wisps of feeling began to penetrate that fragile feather barrier. Tears began to accumulate and fall, like droplets from melting snow.

In those initial hours, as shock – sweet, protective shock – wears off, the overwhelming feeling is pain. Waves of consuming pain. On the one hand, it permeates every cell. But then it’s as if someone has ripped something out of you – except a physical sensation would be preferable to the psychic agony, which has no finite edges.

To never see Gregory alive again. Never touch him or be touched by him. Never look at him sitting across the couch. Never engage in our repartee. Never share the private jokes and glances. Never see him burst through the door, carrying his laundry to hang on my line. Never smell smoke from the grill in his hair. Never get called away from tossing a salad to come quick and see this sunset. Never feel him entwined with me beneath the covers.

It becomes a mantra of pain: Never. Never. Never. Never.

Whether it happens quickly, as with Gregory, or slowly, the way Isabel just ebbed away, death is the same line of demarcation. Our twin loves. Here, then gone.

Photographs by Paul Caponigro

3. Shock Waves

So anyway, when Mario and I first met face-to-face, it had been three years since Gregory died. I was emerging from the tunnel of grief that he had just entered. The sheer pain at the beginning of that journey is hard for anyone who hasn’t been there to imagine. Trust me, you really don’t want to.

With physical pain, there’s a parameter. It may not hurt any less, but it’s confined in your being in a different way. With grief, especially over someone you love so deeply and completely, the pain is all-consuming: Your heart aches. You mind can’t stop circling around the memories, the what-ifs, the might-have-beens. Your body is wracked. You just feel ragged and raw, like someone has scraped off the top layer of skin.

Losing a soul mate is the 9-11 of an individual life. Yes, there are other loses that equal and surpass it. But they are few. Like 9-11, you can’t go back. Yet you can’t bear to go forward. Life exists in terms of before the death and after the death. Before they died and after they died.

For me, the agonizing part began that first night, when a friend – not Gregory – met me at the airport. I just assumed that Gregory had gotten tied up in a project. That was so like him.

So when Harry said, “Ann, Gregory had a heart attack Saturday,” I was shocked enough. In a nanosecond, I was already shifting to absorb the information, thinking, “We’ll have to go by the hospital now.” But Harry wasn’t finished. “Ann, he died.”

Died. Died? The towers were coming down.

The only thing I can compare it to is being hit by a huge feather pillow. It breaks, and suddenly it’s like you’re in a snow globe, surrounded by white feathers, swirling between you and the rest of the world. This was shock, throwing up a protective mental barrier between me and what seems like unbearable news. The pain would come later.

Unlike my off-the-precipice plunge, Mario was with his Isabel to the final moment. Holding her hand. She was in a nursing home, where she had been for about a month, finally overwhelmed by the effects of MS.

“They used those words ‘palliative’ and ‘hospice,’” Mario says. They’re code words. “You don’t know what they are till you have to deal with them. The others were ‘Keep them comfortable’ and ‘Keep them as pain-free as possible.’” They are all words that mean a person is dying.

So the morning it happened, Mario got to the nursing home early, and he and Isabel watched the sunrise through her window. “We talked. She had some lucidity.” The doctors had done some tests the night before to determine why her stomach was distended. They told him that her vital organs were beginning to fail. It would not be much longer.

“We gave her a bath,” he says. And when they were done, her breathing started to change. “She said, ‘I’m dying.’” The doctors gave her a shot of morphine to control the pain, something that would likely contribute to her dying more quickly.

“Once they gave her the dose, she spent the next couple of hours breathing heavily. She was not really conscious, but once in a while she would say something from deep inside. Her breathing became slower. And finally, her breathing just went ‘whoosh.’

“That was it. I could see the spirit leaving. I was holding her hand and felt the energy of her body leaving.” As soon as that happened, Mario says, he knew that she was not there anymore. He told the nurses to call the mortuary.

For Mario, the towers had been coming down in slow motion for months. He and Isabel had sprinted down the stairs together - faster, faster - in an attempt to outrun the inevitable. But the towers came down around them anyway. And while Isabel broke for the other side, Mario found himself just beyond the buildings, looking back. For the moment, he was suspended.

"You go through the motions," he says. Make calls. Set things up. Tell friends and family. "That's the shock part." The after-crash would begin soon enough.

2. One Great Love

I heard a quote on the radio that goes something like this: You may love many times in your life, but there is only one Great Love.

If you’ve ever had your Great Love, you understand. I do, and Mario does. Only, he’s not the Great Love of my life, nor am I the Great Love of his.

Now you might think that would make us sad. But it does not. It has allowed us to appreciate our relationship for what it is. And, in some quirky way, understand what the other lost.

Mario’s Great Love was Izzy – short for Isabel.

Mine was Gregory. Let me tell you something about him.

Gregory – never just Greg – had a Lebanese-American dad. But some of that edge was diluted by his mother, who was Polish-American.

Gregory stood out in a crowd: handsome and dark, impeccably dressed, with an aura of authority. Just to look at him, you might have guessed that he was Italian. Or Jewish. Maybe Middle Eastern. In fact, he was born into one of the richest communities in America.

He wasn’t tall. But he had the stature of someone who was. His was a commanding presence, like an athlete. Had he not stopped growing when he did, he might have gone on to play professional baseball.

All this was attractive, but what captivated me were his eyes: deep, brown, intense. They burned. And, in unguarded moments, they were the saddest eyes. Only after his death did I learn the secrets behind that sadness.

I have come to believe that Gregory didn’t die of a heart attack. I think it was probably a broken heart.