The Grieving of Things

mourning is not just for death

editor’s note: I know this newsletter has been harping on the same themes since January; love, loss, heartbreak, endings. Maybe I’ll get back to talking about my favorite albums or childhood memories eventually, maybe I’ll just keep dealing with my emotions paragraph by paragraph. This has all been very helpful in enabling me to process my feelings, and I appreciate those of you who have stuck around to read what amounts to diary entries of the brokenhearted. I’m getting there.

Grieving is not just for death, as I’ve discovered. After dealing with months of varying emotions and near mental breakdown, I’ve finally accepted that I am grieving my marriage. In order to do that, I had to accept that the marriage is dead. This was a difficult and heartbreaking thing to reckon with. I mean, I knew it. I knew when he asked for a separation, I knew when he moved out, I knew when the text conversations between us no longer contained “how are you doing” and just were missives about the house or the divorce.

When he dropped off the signed divorce papers last Wednesday night - he left them in the mailbox and my son brought them in to me - it felt like the life drained from my body. A despair washed over me as if this was all new and fresh, like I was just hearing of it. This is it, I thought. It’s over. Done. The emotional pain was raw and searing; it coursed through my body, a hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt before.

So many people told me over the course of the past nine months that I was grieving, mourning, that the breakup of a marriage was like a death in the family. It was only then, in that moment, that I realized it was true. My heart sank, I cried, I curled up in a fetal position and wished to be experiencing anything but this grief, this despair.

There are, as most of you know, five stages of dealing with grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Sometimes you feel them one at a time, but I think for most people you experience them all at once, a conglomeration of emotions that when combined form a sea of giant waves that threaten to drown you.

I started with the bargaining. Maybe if I change he’ll stay. Maybe if I fix whatever I did wrong he’ll stay. But it became clear to me that this wasn’t a me problem, it was his own doing, a problem of his own making, and nothing I’d do would change the trajectory of our relationship. Once I moved that stage aside, the others hit me with their wave. I refused to believe it was happening, I was incredibly, inconsolably sad. I was pissed the hell off. I would be in bed trying to fall asleep and the feeling that I was drowning wouldn’t let up so I’d lie awake for hours trying to grapple with all the feelings. I took days off of work to come to grips with what was happening. I fluctuated between wanting to punch him and wanting to grab onto him and tell him to please come back. I sunk into the couch, I cursed him out to no one in particular.

And then there was Wednesday night and the divorce papers and those waves crashed over me and as I was flailing and trying to breathe it hit me: acceptance. This was happening, this was real, I was getting divorced. My marriage was definitely, solidly over. There was no going back, no more bargaining, no more denial. When I grasped onto acceptance, those other two stages faded into the background and I was just left with the anger and sadness and the knowledge that fourteen years of love and hope were gone forever.

There’s a certain comfort in acceptance of your fate. Nothing you do can change the circumstances now. You have to swim your way out of those rolling waves, get your head above water and find your way to shore. Saying “this is my life now and I need to live it as such” is very powerful. I accept that my marriage is over. I accept that a fourteen year relationship is done with. But I also accept that I will continue to feel anger and sadness over it, that there is no timetable for grief. There is just this constant climbing of stairs, one at a time, trying to reach a plateau. I may not ever get there, I may constantly feel this lingering grief, this muddy sadness and that is part of my acceptance. The mourning process is long and for some it has no end. I hope I find a peace that alludes me right now. They say death is not the end. I hope this is a beginning of sorts for me right now. In the meantime, I’m going to continue to grieve while I make my way to shore.