Is it okay to be happy? When good news stirs grief for whats been lost. -

I thought someone had died when the phone rang at 5:15 a.m. because, what else could it be?

“Who is it?” I twisted in the dark toward my husband. “What happened?”

My heart raced. I’d been here before, suspended in time, the moment that precedes hearing terrible news. Then the dog began licking my face. Cupping his hand over the phone, my husband, Moungi Bawendi, turned and whispered: “Stockholm.”

The worst news

Nearly 10 years ago, a state trooper showed up at my front door, at a different house across town, to deliver the news that my first husband, Seth, had jumped from a nearby bridge to his death. Our daughters were 8 and 11 at the time. His suicide felt out of the blue.

In a moment, our lives had been violently scrambled, our bodies plucked up and placed on a new path we did not choose.

On that first night, as the girls slept huddled beside me, and I drugged myself with Ativan, I could not imagine ever recovering.

Seth and I had been married for 12 years. Then, on a sultry summer morning, he was gone, and I had to pick my kids up from day camp and tell them the man they adored was dead. I instantly took on the role of both mother and father, sitting in the front row at school performances, clapping loudest, trying to make up for what they’d lost.

And I dug obsessively, desperate to figure out why he’d turned his back on us, until I learned the ways that deep, shame-laced depression creates a kind of tunnel vision in which the only goal is to stop the pain.

This, I thought back then, is what it feels like to be doomed.

It turns out, I was wrong, mostly.

Despite the yearning and sorrow that we still hold, the three of us woke up that first bewildering morning and planned for one day, then the next. The girls grew up. We worked and loved and missed their father and went on.

Then, during a snowy, record-setting New England winter, friends suggested Moungi and I meet. Like my late husband, Moungi was also a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At our first date over coffee, I was sweaty with anxiety, unprepared to embark on a new relationship, and sensing that somehow any interest in another man was a betrayal. But Moungi was kind as he listened to me ramble about my fears and concerns for the children.

Tall, lanky and Paris-born, he was an understated chemistry professor who’d recently taken up ice-climbing and spoke tenderly of his daughter. His father was a Tunisian mathematician.

There was no denying our chemistry.

Five years after Seth’s death, Moungi and I married. Our daughters circled around us, beaming in their short, flowery dresses. We began the work of rebuilding a family.

When good news follows grief

The pre-dawn phone call, it turns out, was for something truly extraordinary. My husband, a brilliant scientist, had just won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

At 5:45, the photographers started knocking on our front door. There were press calls and standing ovations when he entered a room; shock and wonder; explanations of quantum mechanics and nanoparticles. There were messages from the President of Tunisia and Moungi’s childhood babysitter, and screens full of texts with balloons and confetti.

Through it all, I kept thinking that to be human is to be clueless about the trajectory of life.

The day after the Nobel news, when things began to settle and we were deep into online shopping for gowns to wear for the King of Sweden’s banquet, my younger daughter, now 17, approached me looking worried.

“It’s weird,” she said. “All of these good things are happening, and we’re experiencing them only because dad died. Not, like, exactly because he died, but if he didn’t, we’d be living a different life.”

I nodded, because it was weird, and also true. We reassured each other that different good things would have happened if our family had remained intact.

Seth was brilliant too — a robotics professor and engineer who played Ultimate Frisbee and often taught his classes wearing shorts.

He and his students had been working on a humanoid robot, Atlas, that would enter disaster zones and clean up. Who knew what he might have achieved?

A different path

Despite the thrill of the day, I couldn’t shake this fact of the path not taken, the path we were forced off, and it somehow made the prize more complex and fraught.

Good news carries its own baggage.

At a celebration for Moungi that afternoon, I played the doting wife and remembered taking on the same role years before, in another building on campus, but by Seth’s side.

The more pride I felt for Moungi, the more regret rose in my throat recalling my inability to save Seth and protect my girls from such loss. Then I chastised myself for being such a buzzkill, thinking about my dead husband when my live one was experiencing the most thrilling, head-spinning day of his career.

On the weekend I threw a party, with close friends and our kids crammed in the kitchen drinking Kir royales and snacking on French cheeses with fig jam. These were the people who had gathered around me in crisis, and now it was time to celebrate.

I silenced the crowd for a toast, speaking with love about how Moungi is no schmoozer or glad hander. He possesses a quiet depth that is grounding. He shows up, pays attention and works as a collaborator with little ego, freely giving credit to others.

On prize day, at the morning press conference, when reporters steered clear of questions on the science of quantum dots, Moungi helped out by offering up a personal story. As a freshman at Harvard, he’d said, he failed his first chemistry test. Not only failed, but got the worst grade in the class. “It could have destroyed me,” he said. But he figured out how to study for exams and never failed again. “The lesson,” he added, “is perseverance.”

My limbs still carry memories of my former life, the one snatched from me, the one that suddenly turned nightmarish with screams and cries and regret for our little girls.

But what choice do I — really all of us — have but to persevere? To take the call knowing it might be news of a death or a voice from Stockholm.

At the party, we chatted about our plans for Sweden — the girls would all be there, in longer dresses and wiser, more attuned to complexity and the hardships of humanity.

Sometimes, I wish for a life in which these extreme highs and lows are softened, more predictable, days in which the ring of the phone does not elicit panic; when you’d know what the morning might bring.

But that’s not the way of this world. A long silence might suddenly explode into the song that broke your heart long ago, or the light that beams from an unseen particle could open up worlds we’d never known.

Rachel Zimmerman is a journalist and writer based in Cambridge, Mass. She is author of the forthcoming, Us, After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide, to be published in 2024.

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