Everyone knows the Jewish tradition where, at the end of the wedding ceremony, the groom steps on a glass, guests yell “Mazel Tov!” and the celebration begins. The meaning behind this tradition is one that I love, as it’s ancient wisdom at its best. It tells us that even in times of celebration we must acknowledge the world’s brokenness. And even when the world is broken, we must let ourselves celebrate.
This isn’t a story about that broken glass, although T.J. did fulfill that tradition when we married in December. Rather, this is a story about a widow, precious stemware, and the meaning of it all.
Some days before New Years, a wedding gift came in the mail from a dear friend whose mother survived the Holocaust by escaping from Denmark to Sweden during the rescue of the Danish Jews—a similar story as my grandmother. This friend sent us a pair of truly stunning aquavit glasses hand blown in Sweden. Since it is our family stories that connect us, the gift was symbolism on top of sentiment indeed.
The only other time I’ve received such beautiful stemware was for my first wedding; that set was Czech, which is where my grandmother was born, and always destined to be precious. But when my first husband, Sergiusz, died just shy of our first wedding anniversary, those glasses went high up on a shelf to be out of reach and out of harm’s way. They became an object to be looked at—a symbol more than the vessel for cordials they were intended to be. And they didn’t come down from that high shelf until this recent pair of aquavit glasses arrived. It was time, I felt, to let the precious of the past mingle with the precious of the present. And to actually use it all.
That became a topic of conversation as we gathered with friends on New Year’s Eve. We compared stories of the items we’d be heartbroken to lose. For one friend it was fancy glasses that her father had from his divorce (the relationship before he met her mother). Another item I thought of for myself was a little ceramic dog, a Dalmation, that lived in my childhood dollhouse. For T.J., it was his late-grandfather’s century-old Kodak printing frame.
The precedent for this attachment to memory via object runs generations deep. It is a core memory for me that when I was a young teen, my grandmother’s house was robbed and the little bit of jewelry she had from the family she lost in the Holocaust was stolen. That was the start of a period of severe depression for her; it was the loss of objects that broke open the emotion.
Less dramatic on the scale of loss is that us grandchildren would sometimes be the cause of her sentimental items being broken. I talk about this in the first episode of We Share The Same Sky:
Every piece of art in her house had a story. Sometimes we would break her stories. Sometimes at holiday meals we'd knock over the precious stemware. The sharp edges of the thick, red glass would cover the floor. The disposable pieces of her childhood memories laid out in front of her descendants.
On the night of New Years Eve, surrounded by our friends’ own fancy glasses, we had a post-midnight dance party in their living room that gave us tired bodies and satisfied spirits. It was nearing 2 a.m. by the time we arrived home and not soon after walking in the door, I heard a gentle crash and my new husband say, “There’s blood.”
He was standing in front of the shelf lined with our new and old stemware, the one that I had just reorganized in the days before. It was a shelf I worried the cat might get to, but never worried that a body would fall into. I guess we can say he tripped over the stuff on the floor that we had yet to reorganize after the wedding, or we can blame the champagne, reader’s choice.
Only one glass broke: a Czech one from my first marriage, and its sacrifice seemed to have protected the others. I went stoic. It was late. I was tired. I cleaned up the shards of glass, repositioned everything to where it was supposed to be, and got ready for bed. Don’t be too upset, it’s just an object, I sternly told myself. There is still one left.
The next morning, while washing dishes, T.J. broke a rarely-used and irreplaceable champagne flute from my late mother-in-law, which had also been a gift from my first wedding. “2025 has been a bad year for stemware,” he sheepishly admitted.
It had been less than a month since we got married and the symbolism of him accidentally breaking things from my past, particularly my married life, was so easy to find that I didn’t even want it. I sighed, poured myself a cup of coffee, and took a few minutes to cry. I wasn’t mad, even though I kind of wanted to be. He rubbed my back without trying to fix what happened. There’s no replacing or repairing when the person the object is attached to has died. There is simply sadness and acceptance.
I was single for many years before meeting T.J. and the men I dated during that time each responded to my widowhood in different ways. Some struggled with it, not understanding how I could hold space for my late husband while still being able to give my heart to someone else. Some men were indifferent, as in it probably didn’t matter much to them because they weren’t all that invested in our relationship to begin with. Some used it as an opportunity to dump their trauma onto me: I remember one guy I only went on a few dates with crying to me over the memory of burying a good friend. To make that moment even worse, his tears came in the middle of us making out. Obviously all of those relationships ended.
And then I met T.J. and he’s never felt threatened by my love for Sergiusz and the life we once had together. Rather he’s had curiosity and compassion. He’s never asked me to hide the objects or pictures that reminded me of my life before him, and also has never been indifferent to the significance of it all. And he’s never tried to compare his life experiences with my own, which some divorcees do. Whether intentional or not, T.J. has created so much space for me to miss and love what I lost all those years ago, that I’ve been able to develop a new relationship with my widowhood. And it’s a relationship that doesn’t require me to hold impossibly tight onto objects. I couldn’t have verbalized that though until those glasses broke.
The next day I told my friend who we spent New Years with about the broken glasses. I admitted to her that I wish I had used them during all those years and not just admired them. But like the broken glass at our wedding, there was some ancient wisdom in the whole idea that even when things are broken, you still gotta find the joy. So, we laughed at the whole situation—just a little bit though—it seemed like the right thing to do.
Note for the Reader: T.J. has given me his permission to tell you all this story. He’s also okay with me sharing publicly that this isn’t the first time he’s broken something irreplaceable of mine, but more on that in a future essay.
