When it's over, we're over

As things come to a close according to the terms of my divorce agreement, the sale of my house, the settlement of financial affairs, I am seeing something new, something I hadn't seen clearly before. When all this is over, and it is rapidly coming to a close here, all contact with my ex-wife will cease. Even though the past few months since our divorce hearing have only seen occasional emails and phone calls, mostly initiated by me, that has been communication that I have grown used to -- an attenuated thread of exchange between me and the woman I loved and love still, who will legally be my ex-wife in a few short weeks when the 120 day waiting period after the hearing has passed.

I'll have no excuse to call her or email her on any pretense related to our on-going divorce. No more thinly veiled, partially contrived entrees to conversation; just silence, decisive separation. No future for our relationship. Because even though we've been going through divorce for the past 9 months, that has been something gone through together: the last experience we'll share. This is when the divorce really begins. And it's meaning has just dawned on me: when it's over, we're over. There will never be any kids together, never growing old together, never working things out together, never making love again, never coming back together. It just makes me a little sad to realize it.

Taste the impermanence!

Today I cleaned out my old house in preparation for closing on its sale next week. At the end of a long day of scrubbing, spraying, wiping, washing, packing and throwing away the last dregs of the home I lived in with my wife for most of three years and 8 more months alone, I was weary and hungry. My brother and I had loaded up his big blue Dodge pickup truck for the final time with a load of scrap wood that he would throw in the burn pile back at work tomorrow. It was about 7:30pm and we had been at it since about 10am.

As Dan tied off the rope used to tie down the wood in the back of the truck, I stepped back from the house and looked at it from the back of the driveway, taking it in. The thought bubbled to mind: "taste the impermanence." How swiftly and suddenly my house had become my old house, my former home. Soon it will be no longer mine. And I live in, have moved all my stuff (what I didn't have hauled away by a junk removal service), to a new place, a townhouse where I now live alone with two cats. My new home is somewhere else. Taste the impermanence. Savor its taste, deeply and strongly. Buddha preached it, Jesus preached it: the impermanence of all things, even the concept of home and a possession as large as a house.