Unsustainable

the pandemic, the end of my marriage, the ties that bind them together

I can look back on my last year, weigh it, measure it, add it up and it will end up being a lot like yours; full of anxiety, worry, a dash of loneliness, a lot of restlessness. But do I want to? Do I want to take inventory of twelve months of despair? I do, I suppose. And I have. Mostly I thought of things that fell by the wayside - eating in restaurants, going to movies and concerts, shopping without trepidation, my marriage.

I could have predicted all but the last one. As restaurants and stores and offices started to close down, I knew we’d be in this for the long haul and that things would look very different for a good while. That “different” would include the exacerbation of my depression and anxiety and a new found depression for my husband were things I didn’t take into consideration right away. I’m sure it was like this for millions of people as we settled into staying at home almost all the time, as we wore masks for those infrequent trips to the grocery store or pharmacy, as we watched the news of more and more Covid deaths seep into our lives. So many of us shared the same anxieties, the same fears, the same sadness. It’s how we handled it that differed, I suppose.

Looking back, I can see the signs now. We withdrew, closed ourselves off in our own little worlds, one where I consumed as much news as possible and became more and more anxious as I did, and one in which he retreated into his own mind, where worry about not working reigned above worry about the virus. We each inhabited a world apart while being together all day, every day.

As the weeks stretched on, I grew to miss the life before the virus acutely. I missed sports. I missed going to concerts. I missed simple things like going to the bank, and I missed the routine of going to work. He would mask up every morning and every night and go to an AA meeting. I would sit home and resent the fact that he had somewhere to go and people to see, even if some of those meetings only had three or four people. I’d try to find something to fill the time that used to be bloated with sports; no NHL or NBA to keep me company in the alone hours turned that time into a void I had a hard time filling. I couldn’t concentrate on movies or books and I missed the companionship of sorts that sports provided.

I missed going out to dinner with my sister, something that filled in the blanks during evenings my husband was out. I missed going to concerts with my daughter, something we were doing as often as weekly before Covid hit. Instead I was home all the time, always thinking, always finding new ways to be anxious, new things to be worried about, new ways to manifest my depression.

I cooked. I baked. I ate. I spent hours staring at movies I was not even concentrating on or turning pages of books whose themes and words escaped me moments after reading them. I scrolled twitter for an unhealthy amount of time. I sat across from him - me on the love seat, him on the couch - and made very small talk as we each descended into our own private worlds of madness. I worried that this blip in our relationship was not sustainable. I was right.

Spring came, then summer, and I was back in the office for a few days a week, giving me a respite from sitting at home wondering when the bottom would fall out. I went for long walks on my days at home. I binge watched The Boys. He had already seen it and it gave us something to talk about, but looking back I can see those conversations were superficial, that we were just going through the motions of conversing to keep us from the silence. Silence meant we were thinking. And our thoughts were dark and foreboding. I was thinking about things never going back to normal again. I was thinking about life in masks, about thousands upon thousands of people dying. He was thinking about his lack of work, his unhappiness, his encroaching depression.

The virus and all it brought to the world weighed on us in ways I didn’t think possible at the time, but I can recognize now, at this too late stage. When winter came and the dark with it, my depression worsened, as did his. We were feeding off of each other’s misery. Was I miserable because he was, or was that just one contributing factor of many? When January came and he told me he had enough, he needed his own space, I was shocked at how sudden the decision seemed. When he moved out that same day, I realized it was not sudden at all; it had been brooding all along, for the many months of the pandemic. Neither of us had ever been infected with Covid, but it snared us in its trap nonetheless. Our relationship - our marriage- fell victim to a virus in many ways. I truly believe that if the pandemic had not happened, if we were still going out to dinner and movies and having lives outside of sitting on opposite couches in the silence of deep thought, we would still be together. We’d still be talking, scheming, laughing at each other’s jokes. We’d be here, together, planning our spring garden layout instead of being miles apart, talking sporadically through texting.

When I started writing this, my goal was to write about the last year and all we endured. But it became something else. As I wrote, I discovered truths I hadn’t been able to face before now. I looked back with clear eyes at what transpired, what unfolded during the past twelve months and I saw how it happened. Had I been more clear headed and not lost in my own depression, I might have seen it coming. Instead, I have hindsight to show me what happened. These paragraphs I just wrote have been a revelation.

I don’t know where we are going from here. I don’t know if the space between us is permanent or if we will try to close it off. I just know that I’ve been traumatized by the pandemic, by the end of my marriage, by my acute depression and I need to work my way out of all that before I can work on anything else. Perhaps I need the space as much as he does. Meanwhile, I grieve. I grieve for the perceived end of my marriage, I grieve for the lives lost, I grieve for a world I knew how to navigate being forever changed. Grief is weird and manifests itself in ways I am finding both scary and comforting at times. I cry a lot. I think about how much I miss certain activities, about how much I miss him. I write. I listen to sad music. I smoke a lot of weed. I have nightmares about masks, and nightmares about him disappearing from my life for good. The pandemic and our fourteen year relationship unraveling will always be entwined.

I have a vaccine appointment for April 9th. Three weeks after that, I’ll get my second dose. Two weeks after that, I will perhaps feel safe enough to go out to a restaurant again. As more and more people get vaccinated, life more or less as we knew it will resume. People will start socializing again. Movies, concerts will come back. Maybe my depression will lift. Maybe the rift between us will heal. Maybe not. I have to be ready for whatever lies in front of me. I need spring to be here. I need more light in my day. I need my windows open, a return to my daily walks. I need for society as a whole to look forward, to be optimistic and hopeful. We will get through this. I will get through this.