A Broken Heart Without the Breakup: An Essay on Valentine’s Grief

By Tonya Ramsey Abeln • Photos Provided 

Valentine’s Day has always been an interesting time to be walking around with a broken heart. While most of the world is covered in pink foil and red hearts searching for the favor of an OpenTable reservation, the broken hearted is wearing grey unwashed sweatpants, surrounded by beige foods and trying to muster up some enthusiasm for “Galentine’s.” 

The modern-day breakup can happen without the favor of formality, but the heartbreak is real and it can flatten you nonetheless. However, a romantic breakup has a recognizable story arc—a rhythm and choreography that is deeply rooted in our culture: sadness turns to anger and, ultimately, fuels the fantasy of revenge. We may go through this cycle several times in our lifetime. If you are lucky, you learn a little something each time which can serve as useful armor, but more often than not love is nothing short of a contagious symptom for amnesia. Though the experience of losing a love can color your world differently for many years, your subconscious knows you will get through it, even if your musical playlist turns heartbreak into your entire personality. There will be a next chapter and the hope of loving again will carry you through the darkest days. 

This year, I’m walking through the season of love with a different, less reliable kind of broken heart—the loss of my very first Valentine—my dad. This heartbreak knows no villain, the crash out soundtrack is not as catchy and there is no satisfying narrative that allows me to convince myself that he wasn’t the right one for me anyway. He was perfect to me, in fact. There is no replacement for this particular love. 

When my dad died in January, I expected the justifiable sadness. What I hadn’t accounted for was that the earth, for me, would actually lose gravity. I spent my entire adult life in a posture of isometric dread and anticipatory heartache, braced for this unimaginable reality, doing mental rehearsals in the shower and on long drives while working myself into a wail. And then the shoe drops and you realize you were right to be afraid because you will never be the same again. 

I mean, if the formula goes as designed, this heartache is a predictable part of the circle of life. God forbid the cruel and unimaginable reverse order of a child going first. People who have buried a parent, however, know the specific vertigo that accompanies it: you feel suddenly less safe in the world, less protected, like one string that kept you tethered to the ground has been clipped and you’re free-floating in the abyss. It feels like more than melodrama, it feels like actual physics. Your anchor is no longer in the same sea as you. 

I’m coming to understand that the “healing” people talk about with grief is not the same kind of healing as a breakup. Breakup healing is often about closure, about re-centering yourself, about reclaiming your life. With a parent, the heart doesn’t seal back up into what it was before. There is no revenge bod. Your soul just takes on a new lumpy shape. I’m told that the bad news is you will never get over this broken heart, but the good news is the memories know how to inhabit even the most shattered spaces, and you eventually learn to function in this world while missing a metaphorical limb. That unbearable pain is evidence of love that mattered. 

My dad taught me a lot about the interconnectivity of loss and love in his life and in his death. Before he married my mother, he experienced an accident while working on a construction site that resulted in the loss of some of his fingers. It rendered him with what my sister referred to as “the perpetual hang ten sign.” Despite being a severe impairment, it wasn’t something my siblings and I noticed often. Mom often retells the story of the “break up” letter he sent following the accident to set her free. He said he didn’t want her to have to live forever with someone who had this level of permanent disability. 

My mother was simply not having it and tracked him down where she kept him cornered, happily, for 55 years of marriage. From that point on, he never let his disadvantage become anyone else’s inconvenience. He never complained. 

On the night of his funeral, I was chatting with some of his siblings about that quiet, capable grit and they shared a detail about his injury to which I had been previously unaware. The week following my dad’s injury his younger brother, having been drafted, was scheduled to leave for Vietnam. After losing his fingers, he immediately started the process of applying for hardship since his injury wouldn’t allow him to maintain the family farm on his own. Thus, my uncle was pardoned. There was suggestion and suspicion in the storytelling that perhaps he had strategically orchestrated this “accident” to save his brother. I’ll never know for sure. I should have asked more questions. I can certainly see my dad’s capacity to love and sacrifice extending to such actions. 

My dad had a signature phrase that drove the young, impatient me crazy and the older, overscheduled me to want to scream. Growing up, or when I would be home visiting my parents later in life, we had a great deal of unannounced visitors. That’s what happens in small towns. People just…stop by. As the visitors would signal that they were ready to leave, my dad would say, “Stay with us, now!” In fact, one night, my dad answered a knock at the door only to be faced with a man, gun still in hand, claiming to have just shot and killed someone. Much to the shock and dismay of me and my siblings, my dad opened the door even wider and said “Come on in and stay with us and let’s get this figured out.” He calmly talked him into calling the police and made him a cup of coffee while they waited for the authorities to arrive. 

Now in my grief, I’m discovering the wisdom in his approach—to linger longer while you can and to love others without rushing through all the steps. Isn’t time our greatest gift, after all? 

Some claim time is, in fact, a weapon in combatting this kind of despair. “Time heals all,” they say. I don’t think this kind of broken heart can actually be healed. You just learn to live in the overcast of grey skies, like a real-life Ziggy cartoon. But the interesting opportunity among the omnipresent haze, is that you become more aware and grateful for the sunbeams that still make their way to you. Though my initial instinct after the loss of my dad was that all that profound love was just gone from this earth now I’m now realizing that, somehow, his death has increased my capacity to love. I never imagined that in this fog, I would find so much clarity. And even though I feel like my DNA was ripped out and rearranged, I’m starting to suspect that the reassembling of it may have exposed dormant or denied parts of my past that can ultimately transform me into a better version of the girl who lived in fear of loss, but who had never actually encountered it. I feel both lost and found in equal measure. 

And even though I never aspired to be an expert on this topic, I am now in on a little secret that I immeasurably overlooked as recently as two months ago, back when I toiled over finding the perfect gesture or exact words to say to the grief-stricken or the heartbroken. It turns out, just showing up even with no words to offer means everything. You extend kindness, not because it fixes death, but because it honors the life that taught you love was meant to be given generously and without condition. 

In her book “Radiance of the Ordinary,” Tara Couture writes, “I want to love without limits even knowing that comes with the risk of being decimated by anguish.” 

So, on this Valentine’s Day I hope you feel brave for daring to love, knowing the extreme price that comes with it. And while my heart may be permanently broken, it is one that had the courage to love deeply and be loved, which I’m starting to believe is the entire point of taking up residence at this temporary address. Don’t play coy with your love. I encourage you to express it, not just for the sake of the holiday, but every chance you get. Say it in the most ordinary moments and show it in the most ordinary ways. Do it to a degree that will eliminate any doubt of if they knew how much they meant to you when you suddenly realize you ran out of time. 

I know if I had one more day with my first Valentine, I’d skip the grand gestures, simply sit on the front porch with him and say, “Stay with us, Dad.”HAPPY