Here & There January 2009
By James Kullander
I know someone whose marriage is falling apart. He’s been calling me a lot to talk. He doesn’t want the marriage to end. His sentences seem to have no end, as if that’s going to keep it all together. There’s no break between one word and the next. His life one long run-on sentence that’s unraveling. So I listen.
It’s not been easy. Sometimes I get a call in the middle of the day at the office when I’m really busy. Other times, I get a call at home while I am eating dinner. Recently, I’ve been thinking that it might be best if I called him on my cell phone during my half-hour commute. That way I’d be accomplishing two things at once. While I’m driving to my house I could be listening to him go through his hell. Multitasking.
The other night when I was at home, he called. I was nearly cross-eyed after a hectic day at work. I had not called him from my car because I just wanted to listen to some music. Now, I wanted to get off the phone but I didn’t have the heart to cut him off. After about 10 minutes he said, “You’ve been divorced. How did you get through it?” No sooner had I taken the breath to answer when his phone went dead. A part of me felt relieved. But I wondered what happened. I clicked off and dialed his number. A rope thrown to a man who’s gone overboard. He didn’t pick up. I left a voicemail asking him to call back.
How did I get through it? I could feel the words of my answer coming from a place in my mind that seems like a distant country that I might never have visited, an experience I might never have had. A bad dream. My divorce began with a separation agreement in 1993 and was final the year after. I can’t say that the years have exactly flown by. I can say that a lot has happened in my life since then. Maybe it’s not so much the years that have made the distance between then and now seem like eons; it could be that the person I was then is not the person I am now.
Later that night, I began to wonder what it means to “get through” something like a divorce. Or anything else for that matter. Does it mean we emerge on the other side unchanged by what has happened? Or “un” something or other? Unrepentant? Unforgiven? And is any quality like that such a good thing? If we want to “get through” something, might that imply that we want to remain the person we were before the beginning of the event or situation we’re trying to get through? Or if we want to change, can we even dictate how we are going change? Can we determine who we want to become as simply as we key in a destination on a GPS system? Can we expect to get there without getting lost?
If I’d had the opportunity to respond, I probably would have suggested that he just take things day by day. Don’t project into the future and imagine what might be, or what might not be. Don’t look back and wonder what might have been, or could have been—or really was. Accept the loss you are experiencing now as an opportunity for something else that you cannot even imagine. The family you feel slipping from you now might be better, stronger at the end of this current struggle. You don’t know, I would have said. You just don’t know. Life goes on.
These simple things are easy for me to say now. Yet they are informed by the kind of wisdom that comes from personal experience and the experiences of others I know who have divorced or almost divorced and got back together. I know part of what’s frightening and dreadful about a divorce is that it is kind of like a death. The death of a relationship you’d once held dear. The death of the person you thought you married. The death of the person you thought you were. The death of a way of life that you’d grown accustomed to and want to hang on to, even if it’s nothing more—or nothing less—than a bad habit to which you are enslaved. The death of a great lie that obscures an even greater truth. And that truth may be something you don’t want to see.
I got a call back the following evening. The cell phone he’d been talking on had died and his cell phone is the only phone he has these days. The question he’d asked me the night before had been forgotten. In the 24 hours we’d not spoken, many things had happened in his life that he wanted to tell me about. I listened. That’s what I figured he wanted, so I didn’t even bring up his question. He didn’t want advice. Not even the story of my divorce. Just an open ear and a little of my time. Ok, a lot of my time. But if that’s all that I can give right now, then I will give it as best I can.
After all, there is really no answer to the question he put to me that would have had anything to do with his own life. I know something of what he’s going through—how it helps to talk about it—and maybe if someone calls him someday about what he’s calling me about now, then he’ll do for that person what I am doing for him now. To me there is no better lesson than that.