The death of Dianne, my ex-husband’s mother, opened a wound. The service was in California. I wasn’t invited. I didn’t ask if I could be there. Instead, I agonized over whether my daughter should go. She was in the middle of her college semester and travelling to India in a week. My ex-husband and I argued, he bought tickets without consulting me, and I worried it was too stressful for her to make both trips. 

The argument about the trip was unusual. Thirteen years after the divorce, with one child in college, the other graduated and working, we had sorted through the major parenting decisions. Both of us were settled into relationships, genuinely liking the partner of the other. He talked easily with my girlfriend when he came by to pick up our daughter. I was comfortable chatting with his wife. Our extended families came to Boston for graduations, birthdays, and holidays. Even with some awkwardness, we always tried to be kind to each other.

My stomach churned with worry for my daughter. I finally asked myself: why are you so wound up about this?  I realized I wasn’t distressed about my daughter going. I was distressed because I wasn’t going. I backed off, talked with my daughter, and sorted through logistics with my ex-husband so she could make both trips.

Divorce, even when it’s amicable, layers its losses.

The weekend of Dianne’s funeral, my girlfriend and I dog sat for friends near the ocean north of Boston. We sat in the white kitchen at the glass table with morning sun streaming through the windows. As we drank our coffee and talked about the funeral, I began crying. My grief felt unsanctioned. 

My girlfriend, the woman I would eventually marry, looked in my eyes, and said softly, “Tell me about her.”

I met Dianne long before her son and I married. She welcomed me into her home for the first time at Thanksgiving during my freshman year in college. A group of us, all friends from the same dorm floor, lived too far from home to travel for the short holiday. By the time I was a senior dating her son, I had been to that home many times. 

On one warm spring Wisconsin day, Dianne and I sat side by side on the front steps of her white, stucco house. Two narrow pillars supported by red bricks framed the top step. The yard surrounding the house was large with a long walkway from the street. She had clay pots in front of her, a bag of soil, and plants. Everyone else had gone out shopping.

Dianne started working right out of high school, married at nineteen, and had her first child a year later. She wore stretch jeans and used hot curlers to force volume into her auburn hair. With elongated vowels and a midwestern accent, she spoke with everyone as if they had always been friends.

I was a young woman from the east coast, a feminist confident in my liberal politics. I probably wore a tan and black wrap-around skirt and two braids. I was probably barefoot. I probably thought I knew more about life than her. 

“Everyone else likes the milk chocolate, so I saved these for us,” she said, taking two tiny bars of chocolate from her cardigan sweater pocket. The chocolates were wrapped with gold foil and a reddish-brown outer layer of paper. The words Hershey’s Special Dark  were written in gold block lettering. Beneath the paper I could feel their rectangular shape with a narrow, raised ridge around the top. When I bit into the chocolate the break made a satisfying snap; the taste was bitter and sweet.

Her gesture surprised me. We must have had a conversation about chocolate where she listened carefully. She must have stored that information away and then used it to make a connection with me on that day. It was the first of many connections we both nurtured over the years of my marriage to her son. 

I encouraged her to apply to college, celebrating her acceptance with a handwritten note, which she saved and displayed at her graduation party. My first Christmas away from my own family she hushed the crowd gathered in the living room, gently leaning against me as I opened a present from my parents. The sparkly blue Christmas ornaments I loved as a child released unexpected tears.

My two kids were Dianne’s only grandchildren. She pushed me to raise unspoiled children all the while spoiling them herself. We visited each other frequently, but we lived far apart. I created captioned scrap books so she would feel closer to her grandchildren’s daily activities. 

Dianne loved Monarch butterflies. She would search for eggs on the milkweed that grew wild in her yard, placing them in mason jars. She cared for them as they morphed into caterpillars and gold dotted chrysalises, then gently released the butterflies from her long, slender fingers. One late summer she came to visit, and as we unloaded the van, I saw mason jars filled with butterfly eggs and caterpillars. They were safely tucked in a box surround by soft towels and clothes. “I thought you might want to share these with your students,” she said.

“It sounds like she loved you very much,” my girlfriend said.

I was sobbing now, grieving not only her death but the relationship that slipped away with the end of my marriage. 

My girlfriend and I sat quietly, stories of butterflies and chocolate swirling around us. I took a deep breath, eased my crying, and noticed the welcoming sun outside reflecting off the snow. When the dog, a sturdy terrier with tan fur, came into the kitchen and barked, I said, “I’m going to walk him.”

I put on sunglasses and stepped out front, pausing in the fresh sea air, unusually warm for February. With the dog leading the way, I headed down the wooden path to the gravel street and noticed something a few feet ahead of me in the snow. I walked closer: two bars of chocolate. I stared for a minute.

I walked further down the street to clear my head, but when I came back the chocolate was still there. I picked both bars up, felt their weight in my hand. The wrappers, one a pale yellow and the other blue, both with gold script, were damp. I ran my fingers over the surface, feeling the squares of chocolate beneath the wrappers. I held the bars tightly for a moment, turned them over in my hand, then placed them back in the snow.

The sea air, the bright sun, and the gravel street slipped away. I was with her again, sitting on the steps of a white, stucco house, in a midwestern town, on a warm, spring day.

-Judy McClure

Judy McClure is a nonfiction writer who enjoys reflecting on the small illuminating moments that make us human. Currently she is a student in the Essay Incubator Program at Grub Street Center for Creative Writing. She lives in Boston with her wife and can often be found wandering the Forest Hills cemetery, pondering the stories of its inhabitants.