Jessica Bram and Robert Cooper

WESTPORT, CONN., APRIL 4The couple at their wedding at home and with his son Paul, below, and her son David at the reception.

FOR a long time, Jessica Bram never thought of herself as the remarrying kind, and the book she wrote about her post-marriage years was called “Happily Ever After Divorce.”


She probably also never imagined that she would be flat on her back and seriously ill for months — with a devoted man in a chair beside her hospital bed.
“I had been terrified of what I thought divorce would be — that it would destroy my children, and that I’d be lonely,” said Ms. Bram, who married at 22 and is now 56. “So when it finally did happen, it came as a revelation that I loved my single life.”
She came to relish her freedom, which she used to further a career in writing and public relations, be with friends, buy and renovate a house in Westport, Conn., and do new things with her three sons.
Robert Cooper, also 56, and a director of software development at Fidelity Investments in Boston and a part-time musician, had also found that life could be good after his separation and divorce in the early 2000s.
He spent every other weekend with his twin sons, and in his free time played keyboards with blues and doo-wop bands.
Ms. Bram’s desire to remain unattached was shaken by 9/11. “I discovered that the world is a hard place to be in alone,” she said.
Still, two years later she began seeing a man who hadn’t the slightest desire to even live with someone else, and she thought that that was just fine — for a while.
“I began to remember what it was like to read a paper on Sunday morning with somebody, and you don’t have to talk,” she said.
Yet those persistent whispers of longing were frightening, too.
“I had resolved that I would never use the words ‘work’ and ‘relationship’ in the same sentence,” Ms. Bram said. “I didn’t want a relationship that was going to be ‘work.’ And I was fearful that something might not work out again.”
She was unattached when she attended a business networking meeting in February 2006 run by Mr. Cooper’s younger brother, Isaiah Cooper, a lawyer, who asked the participants what they hoped to get out of the meeting. Ms. Bram, who had just told someone she wanted romance back in her life, stood up and blurted: “Well, to be honest I’d like to start dating. So if anybody knows anyone... ”
“I immediately blushed,” she recalled, “and everybody in the room started laughing.”
The next day Mr. Cooper called Ms. Bram, telling her about his brother. But Robert Cooper was seeing someone else when he was given Ms. Bram’s telephone number. By March 2006 that relationship had ended, and he introduced himself to her with an e-mail message. After a few more exchanges they met at a restaurant in Fairfield, Conn.
“My feeling was that he lives in Boston, so this is not relationship material,” Ms. Bram said. “He started talking extremely honestly about his job, his music and his kids, and I loved that honesty, that complete lack of holding up an image.”
He liked her curly hair, and was quite impressed that she was writing a book — even if it was a celebration of the single life.
They saw each other for brunch the following Sunday, Mother’s Day, after she had breakfast with her sons.
The relationship abruptly became more serious around Memorial Day when he was performing on a cruise to Bermuda and she was in Westport. She called him on the ship, crying because her older son, David, was about to drive across the country to begin post-college life.
“We had spent two days together, and she called me to share her feelings,” Mr. Cooper said. “I felt really, really happy that she chose to call me. It was a sign that we were rapidly moving toward each other.”
In October 2006, Ms. Bram had what was supposed to be routine back surgery. But then she contracted a staph infection in her spine and developed other complications. As her condition worsened, she was transferred to Yale-New Haven Hospital. The ordeal lasted 88 days. Mr. Cooper often drove from Boston and slept in a chair in her room.
“I remember saying, ‘This is not your responsibility,’ ” she said. “Had he been my husband of 25 years, I couldn’t have imagined him being more devoted.”
Yet the crisis only made plain something that he had long been feeling. “I knew that I loved her well before then,” he said. “All this really meant was that there was more urgency for me to be there.”
The couple married on April 4 at the house in Westport, where they both now live. The 30 or so guests gathered on the patio for a ceremony led by Rabbi Robert Orkand.
“I discovered, just as I had been surprised in the beginning by what divorced life could be,” the bride said, “I was completely surprised by what a committed relationship could be.”
Source URL: http://pokbongkoh.blogspot.com/2010/04/westport-conn.html
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