By the time B killed himself in our backyard, we hadn’t had sex in two years. After forgiving multiple infidelities (some that I knew about and more that I suspected) and after being thrust into the role of caregiver for the final seven months of his life, I was no longer in love with him and was barely attracted to him. But for almost a year after he died, I burst into tears almost every time I had an orgasm.
About a week after B’s suicide, I found myself once again wide awake at 2:00 a.m., and I had my first grief crygasm. To my surprise, as soon I was done, I rolled onto my side and started weeping. The tears lasted just a few minutes, and then I quickly fell asleep, clutching my fat orange cat against my belly as I escaped into a reality where none of my current chaos existed. The next morning, it happened again. This time I realized I wasn’t crying because I was missing B; I was crying because I felt B was missing this: this moment in time, this random burst of pleasure, this day, this life.
While the French have long referred to orgasms as “la petite mort” or “the little death,” these sudden post-orgasm outbursts left me a little confused. I was well-known by many of my former lovers for bursting into laughter when I was done and had often joked that it was easy to tell if I was faking an orgasm because I simply could not fake the deep laugh that followed. And while my fantasy life with B had always been dark and taboo, with room for lots of feelings, including lust for others, jealousy, anger and regret, sadness had not been part of our regular repertoire.
I was also really annoyed. After causing me so much pain while he was alive, I resented that B was now creeping into my subconscious and still fucking me over from the other side.
But my tender heart prevailed, and I tried to hold space for my sadness that B would never again experience sexual pleasure in the body I had once known and loved. Regardless of my anger, my exhaustion and my resentment, I still dreamed of him being healthy and fulfilled in all ways, even when those dreams conflicted with my own best interests.
The night of B’s death, I roamed around our house, clutching his phone in my hand. Around 10 p.m., a text came through from an unknown number.
“Are you there?” it asked. “I’m worried about you.”
Without thinking, I hit the call button. I wish I had been surprised to hear a woman’s voice; Alison, she said, when I explained who I was. I could hear her confusion and concern, and I immediately felt the need to protect her.
Over the next hour, she shared that she had met B online and that he had presented himself as single, as a financial manager, and as quickly falling for her. In return, I gently explained that B had been in a relationship with me for the past five years, that he was on disability and that I was his caregiver because he had suffered a traumatic brain injury after falling off a ladder at work.
We intermittently laughed, cried and cursed out loud, doing our best to support one another while trying to process the fact that B was a liar right up until he died.
The next morning, she texted me, “Thanks for being so cool last night.” She also advised me that B still had a few live postings up on local dating sites that I might want to take down.
Hesitant but curious, I hopped onto Doublelist, Craigslist Casual Encounters’ low-rent replacement (chew on that for a minute). I typed in our zip code and found B’s ad within the first dozen listings. He was casting a wide net, posting not only on Guys for Women, but Guys for Guys and Males for Couples. And, true to his lying self, he was peddling a version of himself that no longer existed, complete with a picture of him and his prized Jeep, taken before his accident robbed him of his independence, of his ability to drive and of his beautiful physical form.
“He had lied to me for many years, but this lie felt so desperate and so filled with longing for a reality that was no longer available that instead of pissing me off, it simply broke my heart.”
Sadness prevailed as I thought of him struggling with his new identity. Yes, he had lied to me for many years, but this lie felt so desperate and so filled with longing for a reality that was no longer available that instead of pissing me off, it simply broke my heart. I was so sad for him and so sad about the entire situation that I found it hard to be angry, especially at such a newly dead man.
I was also intrigued. While B had apparently been trolling on Doublelist, I had steered clear of these corners of the internet since we started dating. This was not purely out of devotion; the last half-decade had corresponded with the end of my medical training and the beginning of my career, and was marked by several moves, multiple board exams and a massive increase in stress. My interest in sex had dwindled, and I knew I was more than partly to blame for our lack of intimacy.
But now — touch-starved, broken-hearted and traumatized by so recently finding B actively dying in the rusty shed in our backyard — this free website and its pathetic ads offered itself to me like cheap and easy calories that would give me a stomachache, but were guaranteed to fill me up.
That first day, I knew I wasn’t quite ready to be naked with anyone other than my cat. B’s body was still in a freezer at the morgue, and just brushing my teeth was a monumental effort. Yet I knew I’d be back.
That day arrived about a month later, and I quickly threw an ad up on the site, one eerily similar to the one that had lured B to me. Five years had passed since I had posted on Craigslist, and while so much about my life and my body had changed, I had retained most of my kinks and desires. Just as with the prior Craigslist ad, the responses to this ad rapidly accumulated in my inbox.
And so, exactly four weeks after B died, on another Friday night, I was once again roaming around the house with a phone clutched in my hand, now waiting for a random man to email me back. Our conversation started off relatively innocently by my explaining that I hadn’t had sex in a few years, but I quickly revealed my lack of boundaries, confessing that “my partner had a horrible accident, I took care of him, and he died. I am emotionally raw and in need of some serious sexual and sensual attention. Can you handle that?”
He showed up, two and a half hours later, mumbling in an accent straight from a West Virginia holler, cradling a bottle of cheap, sweet liqueur and grinning like the Cheshire Cat. He walked through the door, grabbed me by my waist and kissed me, open-mouthed and sloppy, right in my living room. I was annoyed and intrigued, but mostly I was relieved to finally be crossing the threshold back into the land of the living. “Listen,” I warned him, “I am probably going to cry, so just ignore me and keep doing your thing.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he chuckled as I led him into my bedroom.
My ideas of a slow, sensual and perhaps somewhat healing night quickly gave way to a frenzy of fingers, tongues and nasty words that I could only half understand. But he did keep his promise to ignore me while I cried, and he gave me exactly what I wanted and needed: the reminders that I was still very much a sexual, sensual, desirable being, and, even more importantly, that my body was very much alive and very much capable of intense pleasure.
I cried a few times during the sex, but when I was done, I started weeping loudly, made a bit more awkward by the fact that he was about a minute behind me in his own orgasm. When it was over, he rolled me onto my side and held me tightly up against his chest until I finished having my moment. “You’re OK, girl,” he told me. “You’re OK.”
He left shortly after, but not before discovering that the bears that sometimes crossed through my yard had broken into his truck and eaten both an entire pizza and a bag of mushrooms. I fell asleep worrying about big, black, furry, wide-eyed creatures wandering around my neighborhood in the dark, likely feeling as altered and confused as I did.
This casual encounter did not cure my crying, and while I was very invested in exploring and honoring my grief, at some point I became seriously concerned that if I passively allowed this behavior to continue, my wires might get permanently crossed, and my brain would forever associate sexual release with sadness.
Though my therapist assured me this reaction was normal — one of the many ways grief might present after the death of a partner — this strange (to me) behavior continued, both by myself and with the random guys I continued to find on the internet.
Most did their best to ignore the tears. One was visibly uncomfortable, and another — obviously intrigued by this emotional trainwreck — began licking them off my face while intimating that his love would save me. He seemed genuinely surprised, and even cried a little himself, when I told him I was neither interested in falling in love nor in being saved.
When Charles, another internet treasure, appeared on my doorstep about eight months after B’s death, he came in and made himself a drink, while I, once again, casually explained that I might cry. Like most of the other guys, he was relatively unfazed, merely answering, “OK.”
Despite our very intense interaction, I didn’t cry that first night. But, in the months that followed, there were many times I shed some tears, and a few times when I lay my head on his chest and truly wept, particularly after very physically and emotionally intimate encounters. It continued to hurt my heart that B had died feeling so disconnected and unloved, and I also struggled to accept that B’s physical body was no longer able to experience the deep pleasure and joy I was once again privy to.
Charles, to his credit, never faltered. While he didn’t dig in, he also didn’t ignore. He remained present with my sadness, and, just like my therapist promised, at some point toward the end of my first year of bereavement, the crying stopped.
Though my tears dried up, I remained both confused and amused by this protracted response to B’s demise. As a trauma surgeon, I am constantly surrounded by death and dying, and I think and talk about grief with my friends, colleagues, patients and families all the time. Yet, despite many conversations about love after loss, desire after death, and even sex after suicide, I have never heard anyone discuss their ongoing episodes of crying after coming.
But as a hospice doctor, I know — and often remind patients and families — that grief may manifest in many, often messy, ways for days, months, years and decades after a death. Whether you can’t stop crymaxxing, whether you can’t cry at all, or whether you are having another reaction to grief that you find confusing, unpleasant, shameful or weird, I am here to assure you there is no right way to “do death.” Anyone who tells you otherwise is just lucky enough to have not yet slept in your sheets.
It’s now almost five years since B’s suicide. Charles and I are engaged, and B still lingers in my thoughts and in my heart. I sometimes cry about him when I am driving around town, when I am in the shower, or when I am sitting outside, staring into the woods on a beautiful, sunny day, but my little deaths are now — once again — accompanied only by laughter.
Red Hoffman is a trauma surgeon, hospice doctor, writer and speaker. She is currently at work on a book about surviving violent loss, inspired by her TEDx talk. More information can be found @redmdnd and at redhoffmanmd.com.
If you or someone you know needs help, call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org for mental health support. Additionally, you can find local mental health and crisis resources at dontcallthepolice.com. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention.
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