I was 28 when I married my school sweetheart. I was a virgin and she was too. We both thought we’d found the best partners in the world in each other. A few months later, she got pregnant. Our joy knew no bounds.

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It was Christmas when she joined a neighbor to travel to her hometown to visit her parents. She was going for only three days and coming back. She was three months pregnant. Their car was hit by a drunk driver. Everyone survived except my wife.

I saw my life come to an end right before my eyes when I received the news. It took several months to just be able to do anything. I couldn’t eat, sleep, or work. Later, I took sleeping tablets to sleep. When that didn’t work, I took to alcohol just to try and bury the pain.

I stopped trying to socialize with others. My siblings called and I wouldn’t answer. That lasted for over a year. I would leave the house and walk for several hours going nowhere. Sometimes I lost my way home. I was doing anything to be alone and also drown the pain.

Last year, I went to her grave and said goodbye to her and told her I was going to move on. It was hard but everyone said it was the best thing. After that, I resigned from work and moved to another city where no one knew me to begin life again.

I kept my heart in a cage, but this time I was ready to let it out. I met Erica. I shared my story with her. She asked if I could love her the same way I loved my wife. I answered, “I’m moving on so I will try.”

I was ready to wait until marriage before sex. She agreed too. It wasn’t going to take that long. She called to tell me one night that her abdomen was breaking apart. She said it was period cramps. I stayed with her all night, putting warm water in a bottle and placing it on her abdomen until it went cold.

When she slept, I went to the washroom. Something in the bin caught my attention. It was a test kit wrapper. The test kit itself was inside the wrapper and it showed positive. I was like, ‘What’s going on here? She’s going through this pain because she had an…?”

All night, I’d been nursing a pain another man had cause. I left a message on her phone with a photo of the test kit and left. She read my message and responded, “At least you should have waited for me to explain.”

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A week later, it was only an apology I received and not an explanation. I came here to heal from the past only to meet the pain I’d been running from. I’m done with love. I’ve mourned for years and I’ve come to believe this: mourning a lost love is better than the kind of pain Erica gave me in the name of love.

—Ben

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