Then the Plague came and Daniel had just come back from a posting in Germany. The number of times I’ve wished I had just gone with him to Europe. He’d never been told his wife could move with him before but I wouldn’t have been able to work in a hospital there. We could have had six more months together before the world fell apart. He had only been home for three days when the call came in that all active military personnel were to return to active duty, but this time, in the States.
Daniel’s unit was one of the most successful in terms of surviving, and that’s not just the rose-tinted view of a lonely widow. I don’t know how or why but Daniel survived all the way until May, the last in his unit to die. Not a single one of them was immune. Every phone call I had with him I begged him to desert. What would they do—shoot him? He was going to die, probably. We had hoped he would be immune but the army tested for immunity and he was negative. I just wanted more time with him. I wanted to be a wife for a little while longer.
But when you marry a man with the integrity to go into the army—for patriotic reasons glistening with valor and honor—you can’t be surprised when he stays at his post until his last, dying day. “I’m helping people,” he would tell me, always patiently, when I cajoled and cried and begged. “Help me,” I would reply. “Please help me.”
So now, I’m a widow, and the one silver lining is that I don’t have to be liked anymore. The other wives always found me weird and now I’ve confirmed all of their suspicions. We’re all widows, supposedly supporting one another, but “widow” is the most common title in the world now. It’s still unbearable. Just because lots of people are experiencing something alongside you doesn’t make it any better. If anything, it’s harder because you’re not special. There are no allowances or respect for grief. The whole damn world is grieving. What’s one husband when almost all the men are dead? What’s one woman’s grief in the face of billions of lost sons, fathers, brothers and, yes, husbands?
But I didn’t throw the water over Susan because of grief. No. I did it because I’m childless and Susan knows that it’s the one weakness I can’t bear to have poked and she just rammed the knife in. I know we’re meant to use the term “child-free” now but, let’s face it, that’s bullshit. Most of us are childless and not by choice. Daniel and I started trying for a baby as soon as we were married. By the time he died, we had been married for five years. I have been pregnant eight times and miscarried every single time.
That does weird things to a person, it really does. You go cuckoo. It hasn’t helped that I’ve been a neonatal nurse, but what was I meant to do? Stop working? Stop doing the one thing that kept me sane? One of the feelings I was least prepared for when Daniel died was the relief. I wasn’t relieved that he was dead. Not at all. But as I moved out of the all-consuming fog of grief, I started poking around in my brain a little and, yep, relief was there. Relief that any possibility of being a mother was gone. All I have ever wanted was to be a mom: to get pregnant, finally give birth, have sleepless nights of breastfeeding, complain about the exhaustion, cry as I watched a brown-eyed, serious-looking little girl sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” up on a stage with other kindergartners. It was all I ever wanted.
And the hardest thing about infertility that no one ever tells you about is the hope. It’s not the going wrong that’s the most painful part. It’s the betrayal of hope that this time you had the audacity to think it would be different. It’s the searing pain of hope as you try again and fail again, and try again and fail again, each time knowing you’ll fail and yet hoping you won’t. Without a husband and with only 10 percent of the world’s men alive, I am not going to be a mother. That is abundantly clear. For the first time in my life, I know for sure. I’m not going to get pregnant and birth my own baby. We used up our last frozen embryo in our most recent round of IVF. There is no frozen sperm from Daniel and I have no frozen eggs.
And then I didn’t have to be a neonatal nurse anymore. That was a different strand of relief. I adored my job. Every time I cared for a tiny baby, born into this scary, cold world far too soon, I had three thoughts: How well is the baby breathing? How well is the baby feeding? How would I want to be treated, as a mom, if I was in this situation? I was a really, really good nurse, and I needed my job. I would have had a breakdown if it wasn’t for my job and the other nurses I worked with. But it was also a bit like a failed artist working as a security officer at an art gallery, or a failed author working in a bookshop. There’s a constant reminder of how close you are to the thing you want, and how far away from it you are. Even though the babies were tiny aliens fighting to survive, they were babies and their moms were moms.