Of Loss and Love

I wore a black dress. Fitted. Above the knee. My high heels made my feet feel like they’d bleed, but I wore them with my back straight and an obvious air of confidence that only I knew was significantly false. I pulled the handkerchief from my clutch and dabbed at the unfallen tears in my eyes, attempting to keep from ruining my recently-applied mascara. I placed a mannequin’s smile on my face and stepped into the overpriced restaurant in search of my date.

He sat in a corner table near the quieter end of the restaurant, away from the chatter of narcissistic businessmen and their vapid middle-aged wives who complained with contempt to the waiters that there wasn’t enough ice in their water glasses. I admired his appearance from afar. Dark hair, silken and freshly cut. Trimmed beard and broad shoulders. He wore a navy blue suit jacket with a white button-down. No tie. He was handsomer than I assumed he’d be. As handsome as my best friend said he was—though I was incredulous when she’d set this up. She’d never had the greatest track record when it came to setting up blind dates. He smiled genuinely when he saw me, chivalrously standing to greet me as I approached the table.

“Samantha?” he asked, slightly self-consciously, as if I could have just as easily been some other random stranger approaching his table at the same time he was expecting his blind date’s arrival. I shoved away my cynicism and smiled at him.

“You can call me Sammy,” I said politely, reaching out my hand to shake his. He took it hesitantly, then said, “It’s nice to meet you, Sammy. I’m Dylan.” I shook his hand firmly and we both took our seats across from one another. The table was small—so small that our knees grazed each other’s involuntarily as we sat. “Dylan? As in Bob Dylan?” I asked him, trying to make small talk, yet not caring in the slightest about the origin of his very common name. I forced my eyes to smile, forced my lips to grin. But inside I was numb. Inside, I was making a slow descent into an abyss I wasn’t sure I’d come out of. I glanced down at my hands. My fingernails were still caked with the fist of dirt I’d held only two hours prior. “Sammy?” Dylan said, his eyebrows furrowing in concern as he stared me down. I’d apparently just missed the entirety of his monologue covering the significance of his name. “Are you okay?”

I blinked back tears and plastered another false smile on my face. “Yes, of course. I’m just…I’m fine,” I said, as convincingly as I could muster. Dylan didn’t particularly seem to believe it, but before he could insist further, the waiter arrived, carrying a beautiful and notably expensive bottle of Merlot.

“I hope it’s okay, I ordered the wine before you got here. If you’re not a fan of the red, I could order a white instead,” he said apologetically, reading the note of hesitation on my face.

“No, no…the red is…fine,” I told him. The waiter nodded (almost appreciatively) at this, then walked away, leaving Dylan and myself sitting in an admittedly awkward silence.

“Okay…I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong here,” Dylan states, defeated. I peer up at him in confusion.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…this.” He gestures to the table, the wine, the room. “I know I’m a bit new to this whole blind dating thing, but something tells me this date isn’t exactly going so well. And because you’re beautiful and intelligent and ten football fields out of my league, I have no choice but to conclude that I must have screwed this up in some way.” I typically found self-deprecation to be one of the most unattractive features in a man. Somehow I found this characteristic in Dylan adorable.

“It’s not you,” I told him. He chuckled, rolling his eyes at that, and I laughed too. “No, really. I’m not using the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ line here. It…really is me this time.” I glanced at the bottle of Merlot on the table, picked it up and inspected it. “I’ve never had wine before,” I said to him. I didn’t look at his face, didn’t have to. I knew the surprised, incredulous expression well.

“Really?” Dylan asked, not bothering to mask the shock in his voice. “But…why?” There was no judgement in his voice, nor was there a hint of mockery. Just blatant curiosity. I put the bottle back down on the table and turned back to him.

“My father is…a man of many sorrows. That’s how my mother has always described him, at least. He wears his burdens and pain so heavily on his shoulders that he’s had a curved back since he was in his teens. Or so I’m told.” Dylan doesn’t say anything to that, just watches me intently. I have to turn my gaze away from him to speak the rest.

“My mother always said that the alcohol helped get rid of my father’s pain. As a kid, that always made sense to me. It was like…his medicine. Like the Tylenol my mom would take when she had headaches. Or the cough syrup she’d make me drink when I was sick. I understood why he drank the way he did…as much as he did. What I didn’t understand was that unlike the Tylenol or the cough syrup, the alcohol got rid of his pain while simultaneously causing ours.”

Dylan was silent. I looked at him, and I was surprised to find empathy, rather than pity in his eyes. “I buried him today, my father,” I said. I didn’t look at him as I said it. Something about the dirt underneath my fingernails and the wine on the table and the handsome man sitting in front of me made me feel ashamed in some way. It reminded me of all the times I’d wished he were dead, and now he was.

I felt Dylan’s hand grab ahold of mine, closing around my fingers as if he knew that part of the shame I felt came from the dirt underneath my fingernails from tossing earth onto my father’s casket only two hours before meeting him here.

“Can I ask…” Dylan started, “Why did you come tonight?” It took me a while to know how to respond. “My father died the day after Becky set this date up for us. I never told her. I hadn’t spoken to my father since I was seventeen, and he walked out of our house and never looked back. Talking about him isn’t…well, it isn’t something I do often. My mother couldn’t come. I didn’t want her to come. She still hasn’t recovered from the pain he cause her in his attempt to remedy his own. And I knew that today…today of all days…I wouldn’t want to be alone. So, here I am.” I watched him consider my words thoughtfully and smile, still holding my hand.

“I lost my wife,” I told me. I didn’t speak, knowing he was still processing the words he’d just spoken, still determining what he’d say next. “’Lost’ feels like such a…wrong word in her case. ‘Lost’ suggests she’d wandered off somewhere, never to be found again. No,” he said firmly. “I didn’t lose her. She was taken from me. Cancer took her from me. We married young. She was only twenty, and I was twenty-three. We loved each other the way people love each other in the movies. Fiercely and strongly and in all the ways that counted. But we were naïve. We never thought that love wouldn’t save us from cancer. We never dreamt that love wouldn’t shield us from death.” He was quiet for a while, lost in his thoughts. I squeezed his hand tightly. Not to remind him to finish his story, but to remind him that he wasn’t alone.

“She died last year. She was beautiful even then. Skinny and frail and bald from the chemo. Ut beautiful. Even in the end, I didn’t deserve her. Even in her sickest state, she was stronger than I’ve ever been.” He closed his eyes for a moment, taking in a breath. He opened them again and looked at me. “I don’t know what it’s like to have an alcoholic father. But I know what it’s like to lose someone. And I know what it’s like to feel alone. I’m…glad you chose not to be alone today.”

We sat in silence for a long time, our hands never letting go of the other’s.

I finally picked up the bottle of Merlot again, poured a quarter-glass for each of us. “I’m twenty-nine years old, and I’ve never tasted a drop of alcohol. I’ve never even wanted to. I’ve…never wanted to be like him. I’ve never wanted to discover that I could have the same cold, alcoholic blood running through my veins that he was burdened with. It’s always sat in the back of my mind—that I could have his disease. That I could never fully live or laugh or love the way I want to. That I would carry the weight of my father’s brokenness for the rest of my life. But…now he’s gone. And I’m going to have a glass of wine.”

Dylan gave a small smile at this, picked up his glass, and gestured for me to pick up mine. We held our glasses against one another in an audible “clink”. “To your wife,” I said to him. His smile shifted some, turning thoughtful, intentional.

“To never being alone again,” he said in return.