A romance shaped by grief

Lydia recalls the last time she spoke to her fiancé, Freddie: March 14, 2018, just after 6:47 p.m. Freddie called to let her know hewas picking up hisbest friend, Jonah, before returning home to get Lydia for her birthday dinner. Lydia was annoyed. Couldn’t Jonah find his own way rather than risking a late arrival for their reservation? Freddie assured her they’d make it on time.

We rarely recognize the final time we’ll speak to someone we love.

Freddie dies in a car wreck and Jonah escapes with just a scar. Lydia can barely sleep. She resists tucking herself into the luxurious bed she and Freddie shared. She doesn’t want to wake in the morning only to realize she’s there alone.

The sleeping pills Lydia acquires at her mother’s behest change everything. Not only can Lydia now sleep through the night, she’s found a portal to another life. Each time she downs one of the pink pills, Lydia wakes in a timeline where Freddie still lives.

Who among us hasn’t asked “what if?” at a relationship’s end? What if Freddie hadn’t gone to pick up Jonah? What if he’d been a few minutes earlier or a moment later?

When I said goodbye to my most recent boyfriend during the last days of our relationship, I thought we were going to make it. We’d had some tough conversations in the previous days, but I thought we would be OK. I hoped we would be OK. I didn’t know the next time I saw him, we would no longer be together.

In the months that followed, I fought the urge to interrogate what could have been. What if I hadn’t been honest about the strength of my feelings? Or what if I’d been honest about them sooner? What if we’d met at another point in time?

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A Grief Library reader recommended “The Two Lives of Lydia Bird,” and honestly, it’s not a book I would have likely come to otherwise. I don’t read romance often, including author Josie Silver’s New York Times bestseller “One Day in December.” Of course, this isn’t a typical romance; thanks to the romantic lead’s death, there’s little sex in this novel, and what does occur is closed door. “The Two Lives” instead dwells on Lydia’s aching heart and her willingness to find love again.

Silver’s descriptions of grief are vivid—“red-hot-poker grief,” “gray-battleship grief,” “endless black”—rather than the oft-cited phases Elisabeth Kubler-Ross made famous. And Lydia’s grieving process isn’t linear. She allows herself to tiptoe back into dating, and then she boomerangs into raw grief as what would have been her wedding day arrives. There isn’t a timeline for a healing heart.

My own heart still feels too tender to write about much. In 10 days, we’ll have been apart the same amount of time we were together—only four months and six days. Sometimes I feel silly for being so affected by a short relationship. But he changed my heart. Or we did, together. And you can’t go back to who you were before.

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“Before we get into a professional update, tell me what’s going on personally. How have you been?” My mentor gazed at with me with compassion as our meeting began, specialty cocktails and mocktails between us. She knew I’d been in mourning since my relationship ended, and her thoughts had been with me, she said.

Sitting inside a trendy bar didn’t stop my tears from falling. And as I cried, she commended me. “I’m proud of you. I admire the way you’re allowing yourself to feel this,” she said. She referenced her own divorce, some years ago, and acknowledged that her grief hadn’t been so open. My path was the healthiest way forward, she said.

Allowing myself to feel and process the entirety of my sorrow is the only way I know how to move through a loss. This hasn’t been the first time I’ve publicly cried over a relationship or a death. My emotions can be messy and uncomfortable, but I know I must experience them.

Lydia, on the other hand, uses her pink pills to resist adjusting to a world without Freddie in it. Her doctor was reluctant to prescribe them, suggesting she needed to move through grief without help from medication. Though he couldn’t have predicted Lydia’s experience, she comes to admit he was right:

“Maybe my bloody doctor was onto something—I haven’t moved sentiently through the process. I’ve zigzagged between worlds, taking the long way around, slowing myself down without realizing.”

Our stories are different—mine a breakup, Lydia’s a death. But heartbreak cuts deep, however it’s delivered. As I read, I thought of and cried for the man I love and lost. And I clung to Lydia’s conclusion: There’s more than one happy ending for everyone.

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