A phrase that resonates a lot with Nicolás (32) is the one that says that the best thing for the dead is for the living to live. “If I continue doing the activities that I like, exercising, going to recitals, eating well and betting on my professional project. “Why shouldn’t I continue seeking to generate connections that nourish me,” he tells La Vanguardia. His partner, Brunella, died seven months ago, about two years after she was diagnosed with cancer. What is it like to open up to love again after suffering the death of a partner?
Nicolás had a very close example. After the wife of his father and mother of his older brother died in an accident, he once again opted for love with Nicolás’s mother. Today they have been married for 35 years. “Thanks to the fact that he knew how to integrate his grief in a healthy way, he did therapy and opened up to new possibilities, then he met my mother and they had my brothers and me. I am the example in the flesh that life goes on, that a duel can be integrated: that love can be found again. My father loved the woman he lost very much and suffered greatly from the loss of her,” explains Nicolás.
In the same way, he affirms, “not because I am now with another person or open to a new relationship will I stop loving Brune. That love is already part of me and who I am, but at the same time it opens space for new things. But you can’t press a button and suppress the memory and memory of that love, which I will cherish with great affection and which is part of who I am. I also couldn’t imagine being with a person who doesn’t understand that, who doesn’t accompany me and empathize.”
“Every relationship, whether it ends through death or separation, is part of our life, of who we are,” says grief psychologist José González, who has accompanied “more than 23,000 mourners.” According to him, he assures, “especially in a couple’s grief, there is a fantasy of substitution. “If my father dies, no one would think that another older man of the same age as him would play his role.”
Especially when the grieving couple is not yet very old, – says the expert – “sometimes it is understood that the end, culmination or success of a couple’s grieving process is finding a new partner. That is an error. It can happen if it arises, but you don’t have to force it. “There is no need to look for it before being able to process and heal, metabolize and digest all the unpleasant emotions that go along with any mourning for death.”
For Nicolás, “there is the belief that it is something that can be overcome. The ‘when you overcome it…’ is used a lot, as if there were a limit or a wall that, once you cross it, something else begins. But in reality, grief always accompanies you and is integrated. It’s not going to go away because you start dating someone else. It becomes part of your daily life, of who you are.”
Nicolás does not have dating applications downloaded on his mobile. He’s not in a hurry. Today the focus is elsewhere. Spending time with his friends, doing the things he likes most and enjoying “doing things alone.” “I am very calm. I feel that the person who has to show up, whether to build a relationship, share a moment or just to enjoy, will come. And I will find her making some of the plans I make or in the places I like to go, without forcing anything,” he says.
In these months of meeting people – at a club or on a birthday – what has helped him the most has been honesty. “Not forcing things and being very transparent, setting my limits with sweetness and kindness, is something that is helping me a lot. When I don’t feel it, I don’t force situations. Nor am I in search of anything or in a plan of conquest. I’m just not closed. At first, I had the handbrake super on. Today I already feel ready, but from calmness,” he explains.
“We continue living, whether we like it or not. When you relocate the grief, you position yourself in this new world and you learn to live again. If life gives us opportunities, whether it be a partner, a change of life or a job offer, we have to allow ourselves to live it,” says Gea Figuerola, 45 years old.
When her husband, with whom she shared 23 years, died of illness in 2018, she felt like her world fell apart. What helped her get out of that piercing sadness was one of the couple’s grief groups offered by the AVES association (which also offers mutual aid groups for other types of losses). “They were like floats that rescued me from that first phase of so much pain,” says Gea, who today energizes one of these groups as a volunteer.
Gea also found a new love. She and Albert were very good friends before becoming a couple. Over time, she appeared something else. “At first, I was very afraid,” she confesses. “Am I doing it right? Do I deserve it?” she asked herself. “You know I still love you, right?” She said to her husband in silence.
“Then I asked myself what I would advise a friend or someone I love very much in that same situation. Obviously, she would say, ‘Go ahead!’” Gea says. Something in her clicked: “In the end, you realize that life is giving you another chance. When you come to that conclusion, you give yourself permission to live it. And I can feel very lucky in love. There are many people who may never know what it is like to have people who love you the way my husband has loved me and the way my partner loves me.”
Vicent is a part of Gea. He always will be. “Until I die, my husband will be with me. It’s impossible for me to forget it. Every day I keep it in mind,” says Gea. Albert, her current partner, has met him through her, through her memories and anecdotes. “I couldn’t be with a person with whom I couldn’t talk about Vicent, share what’s happening to me, say things like: ‘Today would have been our anniversary,’” she says.
“I need to be able to feel entitled to talk about the partner who has died in order to relate in a healthy way with the next one. If I feel like I have to hide the person who accompanied me for 20 or 30 years, I am actually denying myself,” says psychologist José González. It is very common for him to be told things like “The first time my new partner came home, I didn’t know if I should cover the photos of my husband or my wife who has died.”
The environment usually invites us not to connect with the pain, says the expert. “We live in a thanatophobic society. We are taught to always keep our backs to death and to bond with the people around us as if they were never going to die. And that makes the grieving processes difficult,” González points out and adds: “The fact of not talking about that person, of not showing that we are unwell, is seen almost as a symptom of good health, that we feel well. It is thought that, if my partner dies and I have a new partner, that means that I have already gotten over him and forgotten him.”
In all grieving processes – González indicates – a double mechanism is needed, “as if it were a pendulum or a wall clock.” On the one hand, coping, “which is being able to sustain those unpleasant emotions, such as sadness, rage, anger, envy, guilt” and, on the other, “the vital connection, hope or what hooks me to life”.
For the psychologist, in couple’s grief, many times, “we are allowed even less than in other types of grief to cope, to have dark moments, of sadness. But to be able to relate in a healthy way with a new partner, I need to be able to have sustainable sadness, to be able to talk about that person, remember them, mention them, continue having a relationship with their family and friends, integrate the loss.
In the face of this type of death, he adds, “many times, the idea is built in the mind that when you give yourself over to love, you suffer afterwards. So, you protect yourself from reconnecting with someone very intensely because your biography has just shown you that, when you love a lot, things go badly later. For this reason, many mourners find it difficult to relate as a couple. Unconsciously, they protect themselves from that.”
“It’s super difficult to open yourself up to love again after a loss. Because you don’t stop talking about that person, remembering, comparing. It’s like you had an ex, only he’s not an ex, because you didn’t leave him and he didn’t leave you. So, it is very complicated, because you have to start another relationship without ending the previous one,” Melisa, 35, tells La Vanguardia.
Her partner Carlos died in a motorcycle accident in 2007, when she was 19 years old and he was 30. That day it was raining, Melisa had taken the car and he took the motorcycle. On his way to work, a driver ran the stop sign and hit him. “You don’t know how much I have come to hate myself for taking the car,” Melisa shares in a post on the Instagram account ‘El club de las vi(u)das’.
For the person who chooses to be with someone who has lost their partner, it can also be complicated, says Melisa. “Her partner has not stopped loving and will not stop loving her previous partner. That other person has to be clear that she is going to love both people at the same time,” she explains. After Carlos’ death, Melisa had two other relationships until she met her current husband and father of her children, Gerard, with whom she has been with for twelve years.
“It was complicated, especially at the beginning. I talked about my partner who had died, I compared, I cried… but my current partner is a very self-confident person, that didn’t make him doubt that I loved him and he simply accompanied me. He supported me, hugged me, allowed me to vent, he was there. That’s why I do think it’s important for that person to be very clear about who they are with and what they’ve been through,” says Melisa and assures that “over time, the pain eases and they let them continue living. In another way, because you never forget, but you live.”
“The most complex thing in the grieving process is guilt. Therefore, the way to invite someone to go through it is to do everything that can minimize it. That you can talk about the person, make them present, feel that you can mention them, even present them,” says grief psychologist José González.
“I felt alive and I wanted to continue living,” remembers Antonio, 70 years old. His wife died in 2021 from breast cancer. “I swear to you that I have been very in love with my wife until the day she died,” he tells this journalist, as if it needed to be made explicit, as if the loving way in which he talks about her was not enough. He and his wife had been together their entire lives, since adolescence.
Inma (67), his current partner, was always close to his family. “He has known my daughters since they were born. She has been a very good friend of my wife. He has always been present in our lives, the only thing that is from a very different place than now,” explains Antonio and assures: “In all the life I have lived with my wife, I have never seen my current partner in any other way. “Like a great, trustworthy friend.”
When his wife died, Antonio didn’t think he could fall in love with someone again. Several months later, he met Inma for lunch. “It was a plan as friends. We talk, we laugh a lot and we sing, which is something we both like,” he explains. Something changed. “It was like a crush or something chemical. It is something very difficult to explain, because they are the same sensations that I had with my first crush,” says Antonio and adds: “I was madly in love with my wife and I am madly in love with my current partner.”
That dinner was followed by WhatsApp messages that came and went. Inma was in a relationship and Antonio did not want to lose her as a friend. But what he felt could not be postponed. “I told her I had fallen in love with her like a teenager,” he recalls. Today Antonio and Inma have been together for almost two and a half years. “This love meant getting out of a well. To have enthusiasm again, to smile and to have the desire to live many more years,” he says.
Inma was a breath of fresh air. “Before this, I had back problems. Then I started going to the gym, losing weight and strengthening my muscles. Today, the machines that scan you when you exercise give me ten biological years younger than what I have. I went from having to take morphine to be able to sleep, and still not being able to sleep because of the pain, to not having to take even a paracetamol,” says Antonio proudly. For him, who is a doctor, this has an explanation: “This is associated with love and the desire to live.”
Antonio was clear from the beginning that he wanted to jump into the pool and allow himself to live this story. The hardest thing for him was telling his daughters. “I was afraid that, by starting a new relationship, I would give them the feeling that I might want to replace his mother. But no one can replace anyone,” he says and explains: “My wife has always been so generous… she knew that, with breast cancer, there was a good chance that she would die before me. So, she was looking for girlfriends for me in life.”
His wife, Antonio explains, had made a sort of triad of “candidates”, of which he only knew two, who did not attract him. When he told his youngest daughter that he and Inma were a couple, she responded: “Inma was the third person that your mother had chosen for you.”
For Nicolás, being with Brunella was like living inside a romantic novel. “We had our words, our codes, our language. There was a whole creative and literary universe around our relationship,” he shares. He misses finding those letters that she left him hidden around the house. He misses Brunella.
“I have a very high bar, I know that I will not settle for anything,” says Nicolás, although he clarifies: “At no time am I looking to live the same thing that I lived with Brune, because that is also where I think you can bump into something. No two people are alike. There will not be another person like her and I am no longer the same. What I experienced with her was unique. A next chapter will come in my life where another person or people will appear, with whom I will have new stories.”
“If I have lost a partner through death, the next relationships I have may be satisfactory, but they will be different,” says grief psychologist José González and insists: “That is extremely important, because many people go into chronic grief.” , where there is a longing and a search for Laura, for Lucía, for Diego. And that’s never going to happen. In addition, there is a tendency to idealize people who have died and parts of our bond.”
“I had an incredible relationship with Brune and experienced incredible things. But I don’t see it as something insurmountable, but on the contrary, I see it as a standard for the type of life and relationship I want to have, where there is love, respect, communication, transparency, the desire to grow and learn. After having had such a beautiful love, how could I not want to open my heart again?” says Nicolás.
