Rediscovering Life: Healing and Connection After Loss

I know that the term “ghosting” has become popular over the last couple of years, but when it happened to me, I didn’t have the words to describe it. All that I had was confusion, grief, fear, and a deep mistrust of ever falling in love again.

Oh, and lots of shame. That too.

To start from the beginning, I had been married to my husband for two years, which I thought were happy years. We were living in a city that we both loved, or at least liked on most days. We had stable jobs. We had friends and a cat.

But we also had this diagnosis that kind of lingered in the background of our marriage. A kind of incurable, resistant depression of my husband’s that would go away for many months and even years at a time, and then come back with a vengeance. And when it came back, yeah, it was hard. I’ll admit that I didn’t really know how to deal with it. I didn’t have the emotional maturity that I do now.

But I never thought that he would leave. And even if he did, I expected that there would be a breakup, a conversation, a divorce filing.

Nothing. From one day to the next, my husband was gone. He had left all of his belongings in our home. He didn’t leave a note. He didn’t communicate with his family. He just disappeared.

I, of course, called every local hospital and got the police involved. His family was also worried that the worst had happened.

In those days, it wasn’t so easy to track someone down who didn’t want to be found. We had cellphones, but my husband had left his behind. There was no social media. In fact, it wasn’t until his parents hired a private investigator that we learned that he had, in fact, purchased a plane ticket to leave the country. The ticket was for Portugal, but we didn’t have enough money back then to follow the trail any further.

Thirty years have gone by, and I have never heard another word from my husband. During the first years, I thought maybe he would send me a cryptic postcard or call the house phone in the middle of the night. I had fantasies that he would come back, and we would go to couples therapy and get our life back. Some days, it felt easier to assume that he had passed. It took years for me to finally move his stuff into a storage unit, and then eventually donate everything to a thrift store. When enough time had passed, I became eligible for a no-contest divorce.

I wish I had the word back then: ghosting. Because I wasn’t quite a widow, but I also wasn’t a normal divorcee. I didn’t have answers that would give me any kind of closure. All I had was a ghost that haunted me.

As you can probably guess, this put quite a damper on my dating life. I was untrusting to a fault. If a guy showed up 10 minutes late to a first date, I was out of there and headed toward the nearest subway. And when I did allow myself to get close to anyone, I could become controlling and hysterical. I chased men away so that I could at least know that they left for a reason. Even though I had once wanted a family, I focused on my career, because that I knew was fully in my control, and it turns out, I did quite well for myself.

And then I found out about the world of sugar dating. At first, I thought that only older men could be sugar daddies, so I laughed at the idea when my friend brought it up. But she insisted that there were men who were sugar babies, too, looking for a sugar momma. She said, maybe if I had a relationship that was more practical than emotional, it would take away some of the anxiety for me.

I sat on the idea for a couple of months and then, as I saw all of my friends celebrating their thirty and even forty-year wedding anniversaries, I thought, “What the heck,” and I made a profile.

Luckily, I was living in something of a sugar dating hub at the time, and I was able to find matches fairly quickly. I had flings here and there for a few months while I was figuring out what kind of relationship I wanted and what kind of sugar baby was a good fit for me.

That’s when I met Oscar.

Now, I can say this because we’ve gone through so much together, but when I met Oscar, he was a mess. Recently divorced, trying to find whatever side hustle he could to pay a mortgage. Huge abandonment issues. He probably needed therapy more than he needed a sugar momma, but hey, who was I to judge?

On our first date, I was surprised to see how easily he opened up about his feelings. I hadn’t cried about my ex-husband in many years, and seeing how affected he was did stir something in me. I wondered if he might be able to help me work through some of my own feelings around divorce that I had kept under lock and key for so long.

I didn’t say that right away, of course. I just told Oscar that I really did know how he felt and that he could feel comfortable talking to me.

From there, our relationship developed into something that maybe didn’t make much sense to anyone other than us. We called each other constantly, sometimes just to have a three-minute conversation about some random thing that reminded us of one another. We sometimes stayed up all night talking over wine about heartbreak and how scary it is to be vulnerable with someone. We planned crazy dates, too. One time, we went to an axe-throwing place. Another time, we got in the car and went on an impromptu road trip.

There was never romantic love between Oscar and me. I enjoyed his company, and I could tell that he could use someone to talk to. I got very used to our daily check-ins, and I appreciated it when he started to come over to cook me dinner a few nights a week. I was honestly happy to help him pay his mortgage every month.

Then one day, Oscar disappeared. I called him in the morning, as usual. But this time: straight to voicemail. I texted, but the message was not received. I thought, “Maybe he’s on a run and forgot his phone at home.” But something felt deeply unsettled inside me. I figured I was just feeling old pain and tried to put it aside. But, after an hour had gone by and still nothing from Oscar, I started to get really panicked. I decided to drive over to his place to see if he was home.

Now, the drive to Oscar’s from my place is about twenty-five minutes. And that’s a lot of time for someone with a brain like mine to spiral. Multiple times, I pulled off the freeway because my brain was trying to convince me that nothing was physically wrong with Oscar. He was clearly just not interested in me anymore. And showing up to his house as his sugar momma was pathetic and desperate.

And then I would scroll back through our text messages as I was pulled over on the side of the road and remember that, of course, Oscar was not my ex. He was not the same person. He wouldn’t just leave. He told me he was going to call me in the morning. We had a date planned for the next day.

So, I got back on the freeway and kept going. And when I arrived at his house, my heart stopped, and I immediately understood. His house had caught fire, and the fire department had only now been able to fully contain it. From what I gathered from a firefighter on the scene, Oscar had been asleep when it happened and then got trapped when he tried to escape. He was at the hospital now with minor burns, but complications from smoke inhalation.

I spent the next few days with Oscar’s family in the hospital, which was, of course, awkward at first, but apparently, he had already told them about me. They seemed surprised and touched that I was there, and by the end of the week, we already had a separate group text to talk about Oscar’s progress and recovery plan.

That all happened about two years ago, and a lot of major and minor things have happened in the meantime. Oscar made a full recovery and ended up restoring the house with the insurance money and then selling it shortly after. He said that the house trying to finish him off was the best thing that could have happened to him; it made him realize he had to get out of there.

But he wasn’t the only one with a realization that day. There was something about the experience that seemed to completely cure my trust issues. I just knew that what happened with my ex-husband was a fluke, and this real kind of connection was the norm. It became my new norm. And while Oscar may no longer be my sugar baby, he’s become my best wingman and friend. I can’t thank him enough for helping me move on.