“Please take care of Carmen,” Mom said to my partner, Joe, between coughs and gasps from her hospital bed one rainy Sunday afternoon in April 2019.
I assumed she was referring to that night, as I’d been dealing with increasing bouts of insomnia while I realized how dire her stage 4 lung cancer had become. But when she died hours later, I understood that she had wanted Joe to “take care” of me for life, inadvertently tethering me to him until death do us part.
In the immediate aftermath of her death, I clung to Joe. He helped me care for my elderly father with dementia and drove me to pick up Mom’s ashes days later, on our fourth anniversary. In many ways, he filled the void that Mom, and then Dad, left behind. That’s why letting go of him has been almost as difficult as losing my parents.
Joe finally proposed on Christmas in 2022. Rather than asking, “Will you marry me?” he said, “You’re not going to divorce me, are you?”
I understood his anxiety: Joe feared we’d end up in a miserable union, the way some people in his family had been. I reminded him that he’d already committed to me in a way good spouses usually do. He helped my parents at the end of their lives, visiting them in the hospital. He helped me to cope with those losses both emotionally and physically (literally, by carrying out furniture of my dad’s to be donated after his death).
Most people planning their nuptials are giddy with excitement, but the three months we were engaged felt more like I was mourning at one of my parents’ funerals.
My heart sank within days of the proposal; seeing the scared look on my future husband’s face made my stomach sink. He started throwing up almost nightly, shaking at the thought that he’d fail our future marriage andof being legally bound to me, which didn’t feel very romantic. I found refuge in my parents’ house, relieved I hadn’t yet put it up for rent. Now I was hiding from my fiancé? That wasn’t hopeful.
I thought I’d be focused on wedding logistics: “Small celebration, or a big shindig? Religious or secular?” Instead, I was booking extra therapy sessions to excavate why I felt compelled to stay with someone so terrified he’d fail as a husband and father that he was too paralyzed to think about taking the next step.
After looking at houses, drafting prenups, and discussing a City Hall wedding, I realized he may never get over his debilitating fear. I took off the ring, but still maintained a friendship and the ever-persistent hope that Joe would somehow get to marriage.
With Joe, it’s been ten-plus years of an on-and-off relationship mired in arrested development. It spans the whole “Friends” series, but at least Ross and Rachel end up together and have a daughter. I have expensive therapy and fertility bills. Plus, my crippling anxiety about whether the “marriage” ship has really sailed, and if I’ll ever be a mother (at least I froze my eggs).
We haven’t been engaged for a while, and we live separately, trying to call what we have “friendship.” But even that gets blurry. Every so often, he’ll tell me he’s still “trying” to get over his fear of marriage—just enough to stir the old ache.
Yet, every time I think of fully ending it, or meeting someone new, I struggle to breathe. I keep picturing the ritual I dismissed as silly, but has become sacred to me since my parents’ deaths. Mom’s dying wish has yoked me to this man, and that bond sometimes feels stronger than actually going through with the vows.
Whenever I brought a boyfriend home, Mom would have Cuban food waiting–everything from deviled ham sandwiches to my favorite caramel custard. She’d ask them about their childhoods and their families.
To whom would I introduce a future husband now?
I’ve yearned to get married since childhood, when I begged my maternal grandmother to sew wedding gowns for my Barbies. In my tween daydreams, I stood at the altar in a strapless white gown next to my Prince Charming. Finally, I’d be chosen and loved unconditionally.
Yet a series of relationship mismatches starting at 21 led me to my longest and most-complicated romantic entanglement, with Joe, spanning a decade from my early thirties until now, as a 42-year-old perimenopausal woman.
In a way, my erstwhile (now former) fiancé, who is still one of my closest friends, has become a proxy for my dead parents. I crave the way Joe says he’s proud of me, the same way Mom beamed when I visited a new country by myself, was accepted to a prestigious program, or stood up to bullies. But he also has Dad’s explosive anger. He even bites down hard on his lower lip when he’s irate, just like Dad did. I’ve seen Joe pound on the kitchen table and say some of the harshest, most unforgivable things at decibels louder than an airplane take-off, and yet I’ve forgiven them.
Mirroring Ross and Rachel, Joe and I recently took a break, hoping time apart might bring clarity. But when we reconnected, the fights and the avoidant-anxious attachment patterns returned just as quickly.
I realized Joe and I may never get there—not to marriage, and not to the kind of love that heals rather than reopens wounds. Maybe that’s okay. Because while Joe may not take care of me for life, I can still honor Mom’s final wish.
I can finally learn to take care of myself.
Carmen Cusido is a mental-health advocate and writer based in northern New Jersey. She is working on a memoir about grief and loss titled “Never Talk About Castro and Other Rules My Parents Taught Me.”
