Page 49 of Gracie Harris Is Under Construction

Back in the dressing room, I collapse into the lush armchair and curl into a ball.

I ask Lucia and the poor production assistant to give me ten minutes alone.

I glance at my phone—seventy-five texts and fifteen missed calls.

Just as I’m about to toss the phone into my bag, I notice the most recent text message, from Drew. Intrigued, I tap to see the full note.

Gracie, thank you for sharing that. I’ve spent the last year feeling sad for Ben that he was stuck with me at the end instead of you.

It’s been really hard for me to process.

Knowing that I relieved you of a burden instead of depriving you of a privilege means more than I can possibly put into words.

God, I miss him. He would be so proud of you.

Sorry to send such a long message, but I wanted you to know. —Drew

It’s heartbreaking to think about the secrets we all keep hidden within ourselves, fearful of the cascade of emotions that they could cause. We end up avoiding the very conversations that could make things better for all of us.

If I had just been honest with myself months ago, I could’ve avoided this nightmare and kept Drew from constantly reliving his. With this knowledge in my mind, for the second time today, I choose to confront something head on that I’ve done my best to avoid: the day Ben died.

—

The truth is that Ben was exhausted in the lead-up to our trip to Canopy after we bought the house.

The color in his face wasn’t quite right, and he complained once (but never again so he wouldn’t worry me) that his bike ride one morning had been particularly tough.

I wondered if he might have had a bug that gave him weird symptoms—the sorts of things that a fortysomething brushes off because the reality hasn’t quite hit yet that you don’t have the resiliency or body of a twentysomething.

He told me not to worry; work was busy, and he was just tired. I took his word for it.

The other truth is that while Ben was telling me he was fine, fluid was slowly building up around his heart. His bike rides were hard because his heart was slowly drowning.

He was out with Drew when it happened. They were standing at an outdoor beer garden, catching up after a few weeks apart. Talking about college basketball, Drew would later tell me.

“I feel weird,” Ben said to no one in particular. And collapsed.

Chapel Hill is a place where at any given moment, you’re standing by a number of very smart people. Scholars, lawyers, business leaders, and, yes, as it was that day, a renowned heart surgeon.

I’ve never actually been on a flight where an attendant came over the intercom and asked, “Are there any doctors on board?” I imagine a doctor in that situation taking a deep breath and thinking, I just want a break , as she stands up and says, “I’m a doctor,” instead of planning a fast-pass strategy with her eight-year-old on their way to Orlando.

I wonder if that day, the doctor, drinking his beer and trying to catch up with his own friends, thought to himself, Is this guy really having a coronary on my night off?

What I do know is that within a few seconds of falling down onto the ground, Ben was surrounded by one heart surgeon, a physician’s assistant, and his best friend, a former EMT. If the odds were ever in someone’s favor, they were in his right then.

I imagine a world where the odds do go in Ben’s direction.

The surgeon performs some life-saving techniques right there on the patio of the beer garden.

The ambulance whisks him to the hospital just five minutes away, where he is intubated but alive.

When I arrive an hour later, it’s scary, but I still get good news from the doctor.

“He’s going to make it,” the doctor would say to me.

The hero’s journey that Ben deserved—nearly losing it all and clawing his way back to the land of the living.

But that’s not how things work. That’s not the story I get. Not in this life.

Instead, the doctor was yelling at Drew to wake him from the shock that momentarily took over after watching Ben fall. The doctor had seen this too many times before. Call 911.

I arrived at the hospital forty minutes later, having raced from the business dinner in Raleigh. The kids were with a babysitter, thank God. Drew heard my voice and ran into the hallway to intercept me.

He’s in there, Gracie, but really, he’s gone. Brain-dead.

My Ben was gone. His body was alive only so I could say my goodbyes. Should I get the kids? Should I call his parents? What the hell do I do?

A chair was pulled beside Ben’s bed. I sat. I saw tubes and heard beeps. So much was happening. I closed my eyes and leaned down to Ben’s ear.

“Why now, Ben? This can’t be how our story is supposed to end. This wasn’t the plan.”

—

It’s not the story I want to share. It’s not the way I want the world to meet Ben in my book.

It’s not anything that I ever imagined for myself.

But nothing good has come of me trying to keep this story—or the way it makes me feel—locked inside of me.

On the flight home from Nashville, I will write the prologue for a fourth and final time, and in nine short months, I will share it fully with the world.

A knock on the door makes me raise my head from the back of the chair.

“Come in,” I yell.

It’s Darrell. “They told me you asked for time alone. I just got done hiding in the bathroom for a bit myself,” he says softly.

I stand up to hug him, and then gesture to the two stools by the vanity table. Neither of us quite knows what to say to fill the air. Two hours ago, Darrell was a stranger. Now we’ve been direct witnesses to big moments in one another’s lives.

“I agreed to come on today because I wanted people to know I was better, but also because pro sports are a crapshoot and there are plenty of guys who have had it harder than me. I want those guys to know there can be life after sports. That was really difficult—more so than I thought it would be, if I’m totally honest—but I think in the end we might’ve helped some people,” he says, our glassy eyes locked on each other.

“Me too,” I say. “I want to move forward so badly. Not to move on from Ben, but to allow myself to have fullness in my life again. Leaving things behind is painful, though.”

“Gracie, it’s not fair what’s happened to you and me,” Darrell says.

“But what we had was real and good while it lasted. You’re not you without Ben, and I’m not me without football.

But maybe we don’t leave those experiences and people behind.

Maybe we can take it all with us. There’s just more for us to discover. ”

At the end of the show, when Maisy asked where we saw ourselves in a year or two, Darrell answered that he hoped to become a motivational speaker. I know, without question, that he will be fantastic at it.

Me? My answer was that I hoped to still be writing, raising my kids, and maybe, if I was lucky, getting a second chance at love and building a life with someone.

“Can you imagine what it takes to date someone like me?” I asked, laughing, making it almost to the end of the podcast without being self-deprecating, per Lucia’s instructions.

“I imagine it takes a strong man,” Maisy answered without a hint of humor. “So, can you imagine how wonderful he will end up being when you find him?”

I smiled, thinking, Yes, in fact—I can imagine that.

A few minutes after Darrell leaves, there’s another knock at the door.

Maisy’s shiny red locks bounce into the room before the rest of her.

She sits on the stool Darrell just left, gently pulling it closer to me without a word.

Our proximity feels too intimate. It reminds me of the greenroom with Jenny the last time my life felt on the verge of collapse.

“You’re different,” she says, looking me square in the eyes. “You’re not the same person I interviewed a few months ago.”

“No, I’m not,” I finally and freely admit when she takes a long pause to study me.

“I never had any doubts that you were a strong woman after all that you’d been through, but there is a fortitude here now…a resolve…that simply wasn’t there before. How’d that happen?”

She could’ve asked me this while there was a microphone in my face, but she didn’t.

This is an act of kindness. Now my own curiosity is piqued, and I take time to study her.

An extended silence grows between us while I look into those green eyes that once scared me.

There is a quiet but obvious hunger for information staring back at me.

“Why do you want to know?” I ask bluntly, not fully returning her kindness with my own.

“I really did lose my mom a few months before you lost your husband,” she tells me with a slight grimace in response to my brash question.

“And the truth is that I can’t seem to find my way back to anything close to normal.

You seem to have found some measure of equilibrium recently that has completely eluded me. I’m flailing.”

Maisy was never trying to be cruel or mean in her questioning. All along she’s been trying to find answers. For herself. Grief loves to trick us into hiding, give us a false sense of security, and often it makes us wait far too long to ask for help or admit when we feel beyond it completely.

“I stumbled into something very special this summer,” I tell her. “Someone, actually. The process of falling in love again has thrown me on and off balance so many times it makes my head spin—and I have struggled.”

Here, in this tiny little room, I have just admitted that I love Josh. That I told Maisy before any of my closest friends feels like a joke from the universe—a reminder for me of how quickly we can learn to trust and let go. I continue.