My love, my heart, my husband puts his life on the line a lot. Not because he is stupid or careless or reckless. Anyone who knows him would laugh at the disparity between him and any one of those descriptions.

My accountant, my meticulous sweet man has a job in federal law enforcement. (No, he doesn’t have a file on you, no he doesn’t want to follow your every movement.) He follows the worst of the darkness and he tries to stop it from getting into all of our homes.

He has looked in the face of abject evil and not flinched. He runs home where it is all Legos and feeding the cat and laundry and an occasional brownie from scratch. He pays bills and rejoices in the bank statement because it is clean and free from drama and there is no need for a bullet proof vest.

My mom always wanted to know how I could deal with that. Knowing. The. Possibilities.

We had a rapidly escalating romance: A brief friendship with the common thread of surviving betrayal and divorce. A few conversations. A phone call that lasted 2 hours that ended in making plans, plans that went from friends meeting for dinner to a very late night in Union Square making out like teenagers. The next night meeting for a movie with a few friends and him taking me back to my apartment at 2am. I asked him to stay, because he made me feel so safe and at home. I woke up early knowing I could very well fall in love with this beautiful, kind, witty, funny, quiet man.

Two more nights of phone calls, and he asks if he can see me. And then asks if he can crash at my place because he has an arrest in the morning and needs to leave for that by 4:30 am. He came with his bullet proof vest.

Here is when I had to decide – can I love this man and knowing that when normal citizens leave, he will be moving towards? On September 11, 2001 when people in lower Manhattan (such as myself) were being evacuated after the second plane hit, he and his co-workers were being being sent toward the towers. That he should not be here but for the grace of an indented garage door area on the side on the Millennium Hilton when the South Tower fell.

Yes, the terror of what he does – running toward the horrors we all only see and read about from a distance – does get to me. He has discussed with me his plans if we are all in a mall, restaurant, school, etc where the unthinkable happens. Because he has to think the unthinkable and be prepared. I spend some nights getting back up when I think he’s coming up to bed and he’s actually grabbing his gear and vest and heading out GOD KNOWS WHAT and watching stupid TV until I know he’s okay.

But I had to choose: live in the drama or compartmentalize. It’s not denial; there is no way to send your love into the void and not KNOW on some level. But isn’t that the true lesson every regular person learns from a September 11 level experience: every goodbye could be the last; no guarantees.

So to all of the spouses and partners of all of the law enforcement, military, firefighters,  and more: here’s a toast to the incredible power of the human mind that lets us send our loves, our hearts, our everything out into the abyss daily without being flattened prostrate by the possibilities!