Eulogy

This past week was the first Thanksgiving I had without my spouse since two years before we got married. We married just over six years ago. I think two years before that we began dating and going to holidays with each other's family. Depending on the calendar and Thanksgiving, her birthday was usually on or right around Thanksgiving. This year, no call, no talk, no card, no nothing between us for either special day.

Essentially, I have realized I must live as if my former wife no longer exists. She was annihilated by the person who bears her name now, but not her personality or her love for me. My grief is bottomless when it shows itself. I can't put it all into words.

An image came to mind while I was dreaming about a month ago. She's reaching up to me, arms outstretched while she's being pulled away under water by an unseen force. Her hair is wet, her face is wet, I see love for me, recognition of me in her eyes. Maybe a touch of The Titanic finale there, the final scene when Leonardo's character sinks away into the deep, arms outstretched. We saw that movie together at the theater when it came out. I remember she cried at that part.

Another image is one I imagined while going through a formal thought exercise to get closure the other day, the day after her birthday. I pictured her preparing one of the meals she liked to prepare for me, when she liked to cook (stacks of cookbooks in the kitchen bookcase, every kitchen trinket and tool from Pampered Chef and the kitchen store you could think of), and sitting at the dinner table with me. She is smiling, looking at me lovingly, adoringly. She pets the cats we got together, who come up to greet her. She kisses me gently, lovingly. This is the picture of our shared home at its warmest and most peaceful.

I've seen my marriage "flash before my eyes" a couple different ways -- snippets of memories flash by: from the Cape, from college, from Ohio, from Michigan, from her family's home in Connecticut, from our house, holidays, special moments, milestone events, even fights. I cry. Too much to dwell on too long. It begins to feel like self-inflicted torture and I need to stop. The desire to move on and forget must be balanced with the desire to be honest and not forget or deny the past.

The part of her to whom I was married no longer exists. The person who left and who lives on wants nothing to do with me. So, I own my love for the woman I married and who was a faithful loving wife and friend for almost 6 years. There is a part of me, deeply hurt, quietly present and waiting to be discovered, who sobs and does not understand what's happened. He's a little boy. He doesn't understand complex relationships, legal issues, adult reality. He is crushed. I have a lot of compassion for him since I realized how much he's hurting. He needs time to get over things, unlike the brusque man on the surface, who sometimes races ahead of the feelings inside.

I can't do a true eulogy in this forum. It's too personal, too lengthy, too maudlin. I just wanted to express the idea. Basically, I need only rewind my memory a few months before the radical change when my divorce began (before I knew it would end in divorce), and remember and say goodbye to that person. And giving the child within the opportunity to grieve and be comforted.

Experiencing the House Tomb and Planning My Escape

The house is like a tomb. I can lie on the floor and relax and feel that same feeling I feel when I visit the grave of Melody, the girlfriend and friend murdered in her youth.

Nearly every single thing in this house was bought by my ex-wife and I together, or a gift to us, or a gift from one to the other, or something she brought into the house: Vergil, the tabby cat, Ziggy the cat we adopted the year we were married by a Justice of the Peace in our apartment, the maple dining room table, the paint on the walls, the TV we bought when I cashed in my Macromedia stock options, the refrigerator magnets we picked up at a rest area on the highway, the rocking chair my parents bought for us that has our college emblem etched into the back.

This place is a tomb to my marriage. And I live in it. I have begun to plan my escape. Meanwhile, I pay my respects to another dead marriage, dead hopes, dead past, dead love. It's melancholy and cathartic.

I put an offer on a townhouse yesterday. It's bigger, square footage wise, than my house. It's across from the Sudbury River and there's a sign for a nature trail right there. It's on a quiet, one way back street. It has three floors and basement with a high ceiling. Two full baths. And it's currently owned by a Muslim family who, judging from the pictures and smells when I entered the place, cook a lot of Indian food. It felt right, this place. They ask that you take your shoes off when you enter. I think I'll keep that practice. Respect for the living, the home.

A friend said yesterday to another woman going through a divorce (one involving children), "Get your own keys," meaning she should get free from her dependency on a man and get her own life, wealth, real estate, vehicle established. Get your own keys. I paid/owned 99% of the bills here for several years but everything was in both our names. Now I will be getting my own keys. It's a good feeling.

Dismantling the Hammock

Today there were leaves all over the place. It's been this way for a couple weeks. Leaves, mostly maple from the big old tree behind my house, piled up in every damn nook and cranny around the house, the planters, the driveway, the corners.

I had called Mike D., who is absolutely lousy with directions (and I don't see how, even reading this, he could deny it or would want to), but who also has his own landscaping business, to come clean up my yard. I can afford to pay someone to do this chore, which I myself do not miss, though a small, idyllic voice in me was mildy disappointed that I didn't bust out the rake and leaf bags and work up some blisters for old time's sake. Mike was en route and there were two things I needed to clean up myself in the back yard before he arrived: the garden hose and sprinkler, and the hammock.

The hammock is a green and white rope net threaded and knotted through wooden laths at either end. My ex-wife ordered it from Martha Stewart or L.L. Bean a few years ago and one or both of us would set it up every summer and take down every fall. Now it was just another remnant she'd abandoned, too focused on her new life to care about it, like many other things she'd left. I calmly unhooked the hammock net's hooks from the stand poles, folding it in half and carrying it into the shed where I placed it against a wall by the door. I dismantled the stand a piece at a time, carrying the pole uprights and the base pieces one at a time into the shed and leaning them against the same spot. The whole time I thought of what I was doing as a private ritual dedicated to sealing the past behind me, dismantling another physical symbol of the marriage. Next time I put that thing together, if I ever do, it will be as a single guy, ex-husband, divorced man; just some guy with a an old green and white hammock he got somewhere.

Mike called me, lost in Natick, going the wrong way on Rte. 9. Thank God for cellphones and divine intervention: he did finally find my place. I had said a little prayer to help him find the place. I wondered if it helped, not caring if it did or not as long as he made it.

We'd never met before, but we hit it off. He was wearing a Saint Anselm College sweat shirt, my nourishing mother, but it turns out he'd never been there himself. We settled on a price for the job. We talked for a few minutes about divorce, property rights and the institution of marriage before he got down to blasting leaves into big piles with a massive leaf blower while the worker he'd brought raked up a few patches of leaves the old fashioned way.

"What Happened?" The Shock of Divorce and Abandonment in Retrospect

It's been about one month since I blogged anything remotely related to my divorce. I am happily surprised to realize that. But I got on this morning because of something related to it that I need to share.

Last night I was going to burn a bunch of my digital pictures to CD to copy them over to my Powerbook (I couldn't think of any faster way to move so much data between the PC and the Mac), and I bravely or foolishly dared to open some of the picture folders to delete some unwanted pics to save space and time. I didn't resist looking at some pictures of my wife from earlier this year.

March, April, even the first week of June I have pictures of her smiling at the camera, smiling at me. I can't believe it. What happened? Six years married amounted to nothing when something changed in her within a month, judging from the pictures, and caused her to leave. Within two months, she was with another guy, or so I am told.

Not only the pictures of her told me that what happened was sudden and rapid, but also pictures of things in the yard and outdoor pictures from walks we had taken together, where she wasn't in the picture, but I remembered we were together, and I look at the dates on the picture files. Wow. It's quite humbling, almost embarassing on one level, to see how quickly one's supposedly strong and immortal love disintegrated into nothing.

I lost my appetite for moving any of my pictures and closed the laptop. I've come a pretty long way in terms of emotionally handling the divorce. But, I realized last night, that success is based in large part on abstaining from any communication with, talk about, or even thinking of my wife and our relationship. For the past month I have moved on in very healthy new ways, transforming my life into a textbook case for abandonment recovery, divorce recovery. The pictures thing was a little set back. A little tasty reminder of the freshness of the whole thing in my past. I need to be strong because next week I actually go to sign the divorce papers. And following that, probably another month from now, I have to go to the divorce hearing where my ex-wife (guess I can start to say ex-wife now) will be there. That requirement, to me now, seems cruelly unnecessary (I give up! I've gone along, I know I can't stop it!), but I have already decided that, for me, it will be the ritual, the ceremony, where my marriage is formally undone, dissolved and vaporized forever.

But the thing that made me share was the feeling I had immediately after waking up this morning. Thank God I still have my cats and decided to keep them rather than hand them over to my ex. Ziggy, my nine year old black cat, who my wife and I adopted six years ago, was there by my head, both of us sleeping on the couch. Vergil, the red tabby, was there on the rocker, looking at me. Some infomercial was playing on the TV -- 6am on Fox, something about herbal cures, which in my half-awake state I had assumed was the Charlie Rose show on PBS because one of the guys sounded like him . . .

And I thought of who I used to be, married, a husband. And I thought of my wife, and the pictures on my laptop, and how little time had passed, looking back, between what I saw as a reasonably happy, successful relationship (symbolized by smiling pictures of her looking at me, hiking through the woods with me and her mom), and the swift, ugly and horribly pitiful death of the relationship. I cannot describe how it felt except metaphorically as standing on the edge of a void, unsure exactly how you got there, how A led to B led to C, but the dawning realization that here I am, and between her and me is a chasm of misunderstanding, time, space, hurt and individual attempts to move away from each other. And it's pretty much the worst feeling in the world. Beyond just feeling because it drives right into my mind the realization that nothing is reliable or sure in human relationships. Love between people is not the answer. I am alone. The partnership was always just a promise, a mutual gift, and it could always, at any time, have been taken back. One person cruelly demonstrating to another the shallow foundations of love and commitment. I mean, it's not that way for me. I obviously have had a very hard time dealing with the end of the relationship, forced to let go of the deep attachment that formed over the years, and the loss of romantic love too (a cyclical thing in long term marriage, which comes and goes over time). But I've been shown a pretty ugly side of love and marriage that I wish I could say didn't exist, was impossible, unimaginable.

Whew, well, thankfully I have been busting my ass on this recovery stuff. I got off the couch, steady, fed the cats, and decided to share. I'll be treating myself to breakfast at my favorite diner in town, the J & M Diner, where they have huge omelets and the best hashbrowns ever. Some people are coming to look at the house today, which has been on the market for a week and getting plenty of interest. On I go, one day at a time. It does get better, I can tell you that. Life gets better as you return to you and just keep moving on in positive directions.

For anyone reading my blog who's been through or going through a similar break up, I lucked across a book that's helped me a lot and that you may strongly identify with, as I have. It's called The Journey from Abandonment to Healing, by Susan Anderson. I also recommend a therapist (especially if you have insurance that covers it) and/or divorce support group (try a Web search in your area -- maybe try Unitarian churches in your area; they tend to host things like that). As soon as you start making positive steps for you, you will begin to feel better. You will survive, yes, you will! I know, believe me, that although it seems like you'd be better of dead, hang in there a little longer. You can't do it all at once. Just take things a day at a time, or one hour or one minute at a time when you must. Be a loving, forgiving parent to yourself. Take yourself to a movie or out for ice cream (don't worry about being lazy or getting fat right now -- those are lower order problems for when you aren't dealing with the worst throes of divorce or a relationship ending). When you think it's horrible, it may still get worse (yes, I was surprised too), but at some point you will reach the bottom where you know it doesn't, it can't get any worse. Let yourself go there. Let yourself experience the grief when you can, until you get the deepest, most wretched sickness of it out of your system (be prepared to cry like a baby, perhaps more than once). As soon as that happens (unfortunately, it seems we have to hit utter rock bottom to turn the corner), if you're like me, you'll soon see that when you get to the point where it can't get any worse, it can only get better. I am totally serious. I'm here to tell you, it will get better. This is temporary, just like everything else. So hang in there.