Absence of Vows Doesn’t Lessen Love’s Loss

For Nancy Rigg, February is the cruelest month. It’s not just the Valentine’s Day reminder that in middle age she is still unattached, waiting for love. But next Sunday marks the anniversary of the death of the man who loved her most and best, the man who’d planned to make her his wife.

Twenty-two years ago, Rigg watched as her fiance, Earl Higgins, was swept to his death while trying to rescue a child from the rain-swollen Los Angeles River. His drowning inspired Rigg to lead a years-long public campaign that revolutionized swift-water rescue operations. It also dashed the dreams she and Higgins shared of marriage, casting Rigg forever into the role of fiancee.

She would not be wife or widow but would find herself in a niche that seems to convey a kind of secondary status to survivors of disaster. Finding themselves there now are the men and women who lost their would-be spouses in the tragedies of Sept. 11. Although they hadn’t yet pledged “till death do us part,” their hearts may be broken for life, as Riggs can attest.

“Sometimes I feel like I ‘flunked’ recovery,” Rigg says. “In happy-ending stories, the heroine finds a new love, and that relationship is ... part of the affirmation of the [original] love.”

She and Higgins shared “what people in California call a ‘soul mate’ kind of closeness,” she says. “We lived and breathed and did everything together. We were partners emotionally, professionally ... in every way, already, for life, we thought.

“Once you’ve known a relationship like that, it’s difficult to want anything less. And as much as I tried not to have a ghost trailing me around while I was dating [after he died], I guess it was always there, hanging over my head.”

She never took his name, didn’t get to keep his remains, couldn’t share the financial prize that came with the Carnegie Medal for Heroism that Higgins was awarded eight months after he died. But her grief was not diminished by the absence of a wedding band.

That’s what Rigg was trying to say in a letter she wrote last month to the New York Times, in response to the newspaper’s front page story on the special problems faced by those who were engaged to marry victims of the World Trade Center tragedy.

Sept. 11 left scores, if not hundreds, of people in the lurch who were betrothed, but not yet wed, linked in love and intention but not in the eyes of the law. The loss of their partners landed these survivors in a sort of legal and emotional limbo. Some are ostracized by once future in-laws. Others have been forced into debt because they lack the legal standing to get financial help. Some complain that their grief is unacknowledged by a public tuned to widows’ and widowers’ needs. “Here you lost the most important person in your life, and nobody gives you any recognition,” one fiancee told the New York Times.

Rigg has traveled similar emotional terrain. She recalls the shock of Higgins’ sudden death, the emptiness she felt when his body wasn’t recovered, the overwhelming sense of isolation.

She and Higgins had just moved here from Colorado and were out for a walk near Griffith Park, during a brief respite in a string of fierce winter rains, when Higgins spotted a boy being swept into the flood channel and ventured in to try to pluck him out. The churning waters carried them both downstream. The boy managed to scramble to safety, but Higgins was never seen alive again.

For weeks, Rigg spent her days posting fliers with Higgins’ picture along the path his body would travel, and her nights alone in their Atwater Village apartment, still crowded with boxes they’d yet to unpack. She was staggered not just by her loss, but by the realization that her four-year relationship with Higgins--their marriage plans, the possessions they shared, the business they were building together--meant nothing to those outside their circle of family and friends.

It took eight months to get access to the bank account, in his name, that held her money. And when his body washed up in the Long Beach harbor nine months after he disappeared--with their apartment keys still in his pocket--Rigg found out from a newspaper reporter. “When I called [the coroner’s office], they wouldn’t give me any information because I wasn’t his wife,” she recalls.

But hers is not a cautionary tale about the perils of long engagements or the legal protection marriage conveys. A wedding ring wouldn’t have stopped Higgins from jumping into that river. Married or not, he’d still be dead.

She just wants the public to consider the emotional needs of people who lose their would-be spouses. Her life was derailed by her loss just as certainly as if she and Higgins had been husband and wife. What rankles her is the assumption that loss matters less in the absence of a wedding band.

“There’s this attitude of ‘You’re young. You’ll find somebody else, don’t worry,’” Rigg says. “People would say that to me, and I’m thinking, ‘Do you have any idea of what love is at all?’”

The suffering of the not-quite-married can be just as disabling and long-lasting as the grief of husbands and wives, she says. Those engaged to World Trade Center victims deserve a full measure of compassion and support, she said in her letter, which was printed in the New York Times:

“Do not assume that because someone is young, recovery will be automatic. Falling in love with someone is a rare gift, not like a pair of slippers you can quickly replace if you lose one.

I did not know it at the time, but Earl was the last man in my life who wanted to marry me, start a family and be my partner in all ways.”

In the years since Earl Higgins died, Rigg has built a successful career writing for magazines and television and has become a nationally recognized expert in urban, swift-water search-and-rescue operations. She’s dated, had a half-dozen boyfriends, even fallen in love again. But the guy “was trying on potential wives like winter coats,” she says, “and turned out to be a two-timer.”

She hasn’t given up, she says. Her “heart and mind are open” to the hope of finding someone else. “I’d love to fall in love again, I’d love to have that life. ... I’ve learned that love transcends death, but that doesn’t mean I get up every morning and have a cup of coffee with Earl’s ghost.”

Her hearty laugh reveals a woman who has made peace with her pain and accepted the wound that remains. “Grief runs its natural course, whether you want to run with it or not,” she says. And its duration and intensity do not rely on wedding rings and marriage vows.

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Sandy Banks can be reached at sandy.banks@latimes.com.