I loved her. I still love that fine woman. Even though she is now my ex-wife, there
will always be a special place in my heart that belongs to her. I wish her the best‑‑most
sincerely, the very best.
She was hurt. I hurt.
The divorce hurt. How
confusing. I dedicate this work to
healing: hers . . . mine
. . . all who have had a BrokenHeart.
At the first, in a moment, I
plan to sketch the mechanism of grief peculiar to divorce, using the mechanism
of a clock and a comparison with amputation:
chapters I-II. Then in chapters
III-XII, I chronicle my pathway through the Black Forest of grief in divorce
itself, a difficulty cut pathway through a forest of imposing trees and
underbrush. Then in chapters XIII-XV,
we look at the mysterious and feared Black Forest itself, that in a fashion
looms large and intimidating in most families.
It seems fitting to start
somewhere near the beginning, like, once upon a time. When love was confusing, free, and full of fantasies. Where reality was conveniently denied and
feelings seemed uninhibited. In a place
where communication seemed like the meeting of mutual needs and conflict was
absent. A dream-come-true began to
unfurl before our eyes.
Naive children? Blurry-eyed adolescents? Not us.
I had worked hard through over
a decade of higher education. She was
successfully negotiating a second career and was a successful mother of
two. We had both accumulated some
mileage. With the mileage and through
the scrutiny of our doubts and fears, we believed we had screened those precious
moments with enough insight to weed out our delusions.
The season was springtime. Such a sweet love. In the springtime of this love, we chose a song. I punctuated the lyrics and gave it to her
among the several poems I would later write.
The song's name:
"Masterpiece" by Atlantic Starr. Here are a few verses.
A picture perfect painting--that's
what our love is.
And--yes--I need you so. . .
.
And now I know,
I've found a masterpiece
in you;
A work of art, it's true;
And I
treasure you--My Love.
A beautiful song sung with such
a wonderful melody. She loved it. I loved it.
Each time it aired on the radio, we would sing it to each other.
In the courtship months that
followed, our love grew. Could this be
real? I wrote many poems of the sublime
feelings I had for her. One of the first
poems I wrote to her will follow. I
wrote other poems of our love that cannot be shared.[1]
In her kind and gentle and
varied ways, she showered me with love.
Truly, I loved her because she first loved me. She loved better. At the
time, anyway, we seemed to be in love‑‑the both of us. So we risked marriage to share our love more
deeply.
We both had doubts. Fears.
We had experienced turbulence in life.
Both of us feared rejection and the resulting brokenness. Nevertheless, we proceeded to the altar. Arms burdened with fears. Feet shod in risk. Hearts full of high hopes and a dream.
We married.
In the pledge of marriage, we
invested our heart and soul. We
cherished the endearments in mutuality.
We began to build the scaffolding of commitment. To each other we gave intentions and
meaningful touches and gestures and gifts.
All of our inner beings had been
donated toward the future of a mutual and treasured love. We had found our long-sought-after
love. All the intimate and warm
caresses. This treasured love was meant
to grow with each moment. Meant to
build upon each heart-gift. Meant to
point toward a future forever.
We were not children infatuated
with another new exploration. We were
adults‑‑in caution‑‑consciously and constantly throwing
ourselves at each other. We held each
other and looked to the future with all of the accumulated wisdom and understanding
that we could muster. A strength
affirmed here, a weakness covered here.
Together . . . how could we fail?
The intensity was
blinding.
Love was meant to grow
forever. This "once upon a
time" was going to have a happy ending.
This was the beginning of a "never-ending story." We were planning our move to the banks of
Snowy River.
More than a dream, our love was
the real live fulfillment of the dream.
So much better than the dream was the reality. With each fulfillment more dreams appeared. We were in the midst of an escalating
fantasy. Sometimes we were in
disbelief. Hand in hand, we proceeded
onward.
Our relationship promised only
fortune.
When the dream crashed, it
crashed hard. Hurt a whole lot. Hurt way down deep. The crash choked the spring of life.
She doubted if I loved her‑‑doubted
if I had ever loved her. I doubted if
she had ever loved me. The pain ran so
deep. The love that we had caressed,
that had brought us to the altar‑‑we began to deny the love that
had made us mushy.
A whirlpool of sorrow
compounded our pain. We both
struggled. We lost a great love in this
separation, and we experienced the natural pain of separation from a loved one
as in a death.
Yet to that natural grief and
common pain in the loss of a loved one, there was added another even more
complicated loss. We doubted the mutual
love. Each of us had not only lost a
loved one, we had seemingly lost the treasured love that we had thought we had
found and secured with marriage.
We began to wonder about the
credibility and the integrity of the love itself. The very question of love's validity added extra weight to the
already great and natural burden of grief in separation.
Beyond the natural grief, in
the doubting of love's validity, severe rejection shot our communication to
hell. Henceforth almost every
interaction between us complicated our sorrow even further.
I grieved the loss of a loved
one, and I also grieved the loss of the long sought and treasured love itself. Added to that, I was tormented by an
inability to communicate the grief and sorrow of those two losses. I was tormented by an inability to
communicate my grief to the loved one who had gone. The very one I lost was the one I desperately wanted to talk to. The very one I lost was the one from whom I
wished to get strength, for I wanted to communicate to her how much my loss of
her affected me.
The grief and confusion was
almost unbearable.
I grieved the separation, but I
also felt discarded. Not only discarded,
but my own feeling, my own inner experience of love was being challenged. I felt love for her, but "no,"
according to her, "I did not love";
she doubted the integrity of my love.
Likewise, she said she loved me, but I doubted the integrity of her
love.
We challenged and denied each
other's inner-soul experiences.
Her questions attacked my
understanding, attacked my inner feeling and sense of reality. She doubted the validity of my inner feeling
of love for her. I doubted her inner
feeling as well.
What kind of combat could be
more severe? The center of our souls
and the ground of our existence as individual persons were only as secure as
our perception of reality. Now, in the
throes of pain and sorrow, question and doubt pummeled the perception of love
itself. If I chose to believe the one I
loved, then I had to deny my inner voice, deny my own self-perception. If I believed her, then I would have to deny
my love for her. If I believed my inner
voice, I would have to challenge her doubt of my love. The same was true for her.
Our mutual love had become
life-giving. Now‑‑in the
separation and confusion‑‑love's existence became a lie, a
misunderstanding. The realized dream
fizzled in the darkness, and darkness won.
Hope struggled against reason, and hope lost. Our mature and honed scrutiny interrogated our vows, but the
questions only yielded more confusion.
Stranded. Abandoned.
The one I loved questioned my love, my experience of love for her. In her questions and doubts and challenges‑‑on
occasion‑‑I was only a breath away from utter self-doubt. In the face of her doubts, I questioned my
own integrity, my own worthiness, my own sense of reality. Too many times I came short of comfort. Her questions led me to questioning myself.
For her too I suppose.
In my loss of her, I lost part
of my inner self.
I did not like that. I wanted to deny the pain and
confusion. I wanted to blame her. When not wanting to blame her, I wanted to
totally blame myself as an unworthy, debased, deluded, and inadequate man.
Our marriage crashed. It crashed hard and hurt a whole lot.
I could have crashed. A couple of times I felt like I had
crashed. Very tempted I was to go in
one of two directions. First, in one direction,
I was tempted toward a settlement in angry bitterness. Secondly, in another direction, I was
tempted toward a collapse of a self-worth.
One or the other. I think that
my younger self would have totally crashed.
I survived and maintained hope
because I had survived many prior losses over the years. In this great loss, too, by God's help I
would survive. There was one verifiable
reason. Because of the hard-driven
mileage, I could look back and remember some prior losses. From the span of years, I had survived those
many and varied losses (I think?) or at least arrived at some kind of
resolution. I was acquainted with
grief. A real hope of survival existed
because of several previous losses and subsequent survivals.
Though a survivor, I had not
arrived yet. The temptation to settle
in angry bitterness or self-doubt still battled against hope and healing. My empathic understanding of her and so many
other friends were being exponentially expanded. My love of her and grief in loss informed as every loss does, but
this time there was a difference.
Though no previous loss can
compare to this (as none of the other losses can ever compare), I had
accumulated some mileage. I had lived
years alone, single, and frightened. I
had been hit. I had bled. In body and soul, I had been torn.
Though I was scared, I was
still walking. I was still alive.
Though difficult to describe,
in such loss and rejection, two kinds of emotional pendulums seemed to be at
work: one of pain, the other of
hope. As I began to see my emotional
extremities, I saw my moods swing wide.
As the pain worked itself out of my veins, the pendulum of pain swung
between a collapse in either angry bitterness or in a debilitating sense of
inadequacy. [2]
Between the above and the
following was an agonizing period of time.
I did not remember how much time.
I seemed to have been caught in an emotional time warp unlike any I had
ever encountered. I thought I had been
a around. I thought I knew myself. I thought I had emotional stamina and
vigor. The new and painful loss forced
a continual swing of soul between bitterness and inadequacy. What a wretched man I was. Between the above and the following, I
questioned whether I would ever heal.
Was I going insane?
As I struggled‑‑and
I struggled, the pain slowly worked itself out of my veins. The pain worked itself out through my
experience and through my expression.
In order to deal with the confusion, I chose to personify the pain. The pain itself seemed to take on a life of
its own. As I encountered that awesome
beast, Pain, I found that Pain worked itself out of my troubled soul as I was
able to both experience the beast and express the beast. As I experienced and expressed the beast,
Pain, another emotional pendulum finally began to appear.
As in the course set forth
later in this book‑‑the pendulum of hope appeared and swung as wide
as the pendulum of pain. Slowly at
first, yet those glimpses of hope provided energy. As I was able to view and increasing feel the pendulum of hope, I
began to see the two sides to which hope swung.
To one side, the pendulum of
hope swung toward a living confidence based on the experience of previous
successes in severe losses. Toward the
other side, the pendulum swung toward a future place of resolution and healing,
a healing akin to the healing resolutions of previous losses.
When in the throes of the
beast, Pain, the pendulum of pain appeared to swing in isolation. There did not seem to be any hope at all, no
relief to the suffering. As the
pendulum of pain swung, there seemed to be no escape from either
bitterness or inadequacy. This was
agonizing.
With time and healing, through
experience and expression, the pendulum of hope began to swing. As healing progressed, the pendulum of hope
eventually eclipsed the pendulum of pain.
But only God knew why hope took so long in coming.
The largest question for anyone
in deep grief from a divorce is this:
Will I make it? Will I survive
my lonely encounter with the beast, Pain?
Will I survive the heart-wrenching swing of the pendulum of pain and
overcome the emotional extremities?
Will I overcome the bitter anger or deep inadequacy (or whatever your
particular extremes were)? Or will I
stop short and get stuck in one mode of despair?
How long will it take before
the pendulum of hope begins to swing?
Much more, how long will it take before the pendulum of hope eclipses
the pendulum of pain?
Will I ever get beyond all
this?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I can finally say, "Yes."
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