The Hug

Today is the six month mark since I lost my husband, Jeremy. In a way it feels like six thousand years and in another it feels like six minutes. I have moments where I panic at how blurry my memories feel and then I have moments where everything is so sharply in focus it drops me to my knees 

Valentine's day was our anniversary. Not our wedding anniversary, but the anniversary of our first kiss. From that moment we were together. I knew it would be a minefield for me. A day that is already hard, made extra hard by everyone around me celebrating love. 

I have always been a hopeless romantic. I write love songs, love rom coms, love a good love story, love to see old couples walking hand in hand. So now, I can’t help but wonder, how will my relationship to love be now that I have lost mine?

Since this was my first Valentine's day alone, I decided to finally do something I had been putting off for several months. I decided to go pay a visit to my friend and ceramics teacher Patrick Johnston, at Temple of Mediclaytion in Venice beach. 

Patrick has been doing something special for years, where he makes a pot on the wheel, and hugs it before he fires it. When he does this, it takes on a unique shape that has been created by the literal love he envelopes each piece with. A while back, he started inviting other people to hug a pot after he made it, it's a special process to be a part of. 

Last year was heavy. If this is your first time on my Substack, Jeremy was diagnosed with Cancer last January (2024), and then while we were in the process of finally adopting a baby boy we had raised for two years, from the time he was an infant, we suddenly lost him back to the foster system and it is a battle I am still fighting today. Only five months after we lost our (foster) son, I lost my husband. To say the least, 2024 will not be missed. 

Patrick and I had been speaking sporadically and he was aware of the situation last year. He had mentioned several times that I should bring Jeremy in to hug a pot. But we just didn’t find a moment in the madness of the months leading up to what turned into his last. But when I suddenly learned we were at the end of the road, I called him. Without hesitation he made an arrangement to make a pot and come to my house within a couple hours before we would board a flight to Australia, where we would spend Jeremys last days with his friends and family.

It was a surreal experience, watching Patrick and his partner Sam walk up to my house with this piece of pottery and knowing that I would one day think about every second of this process with an irreplaceable ache. Knowing too, that I would one day put flowers in it. Flowers for Jeremy. 

Jeremy sat on our couch and we pulled a little side table up to him as I sat myself across from him nervously. I looked around the room, my mother and her husband, my sister and her husband, one of my best friends, and Patrick and Sam. I felt almost as nervous as I did on my wedding day. The nerves ran all the way through me knowing I was about to do something so intimate in front of so many people. 

I knew I’d fall apart. I’d been holding it together by the grace of my fight or flight for months. I had been surviving for him, and now, he was leaving me and I had to try to keep it together in our last moments. I could barely look Jeremy in the eyes as he held his arms out waiting for me to lean into him, as I had always leaned into him.

Finally, we hugged (and kissed). You could feel the room hold its breath. I could feel myself fall apart, though I tried so hard to keep it at bay. In the end, we both made it there, smiling down and seeing the beautiful curves we had created in this piece of clay between us. We both signed it.

It is the best gift anyone could have offered me in this impossible moment. I’ve spent so many nights thinking about cancer, and how it can offer you the gift of knowing the end could be coming so you have time to say goodbye. Knowing meant that Jeremy and I got to really talk about anything we felt needed to be said. We got to figure out practical things too. Our friends had the opportunity to tell him they love him, our family too. And we got a chance to hug this pot, this pot that is now my most priceless possession. 

But, I’ve also thought about all the suffering that comes along with it. And having also experienced losing people suddenly, without warning, I often think to myself “maybe it’s better that way, at least they didn’t suffer”. I think ultimately my takeaway is, don’t wait to find out. Don’t wait to find out if someone is dying. Hug them, have the important conversations, spend quality time, work a little less and play a little more. Do it while you can. Make things together and memories that last, you might need them to hold you up one day. 

As for me, I picked up the pot. I went to get us anniversary flowers and put them in the pot, and hugged it tightly as I walked it to my dining room table and placed it gently down. Happy Anniversary Jeremy, I hope you felt the hug. Xx