The Happy Half

The two years of our divorce were times of bad stuff, and that bad stuff evoked the memories of all the bad times in our marriage. I remembered the gambling, the lying, the financial treacheries, the broken promises, the disappearances, the times he embarrassed me in front of my family, or friends, or co-workers. The divorce was a time of adding more bad memories. There were times when I was fighting to keep what I had, times when I had to combat lies, defend myself, times I was repeatedly dragged back into court, and there was, of course, the continual bloodletting for legal fees. My story was one of assault after assault. I was in survival mode for much of those years. With Bill's death came a flipside. His death meant there was no more Bill on earth. No more Bill, ever, anywhere. Death's finality brought out opposite emotions. It was as if floodgates had been opened, and I was suddenly inundated with all the good memories, the reasons I had fallen so madly in love with him in the first place: the courtship, the adventures, the sweet nothings, the tenderness, the love-making, the proposal, the wedding, the pregnancy and closeness we felt when our child was born....this is what dominated my thinking and thrust me into a period of grieving. I fell into a state of listlessness and confusion. And I was angry with myself for mourning him. I functioned better when I was defending myself against his outrageous behavior, his outrageous lies, his outrageous allegations. Falling into a state of melancholy was not what I wanted to do. All the projects I had for myself, my exercise regimen, my schemes to make money, were all evaporating, and I couldn't summon them back. But as I begin to emerge from this time I see how it has been good for me. I was never going to recover from the marriage if I wasn't going to make peace with ALL of it. I now see how incomplete it would be for me to think I could ride off into the sunset only remembering the insults and injuries. In order for me to be free of all of Bill and the marriage, I was going to have to reconcile the negative with the positive, the ugly with the beautiful, and only then would I be able to put the twenty-six-year matter behind me. And seriously, that's what I want: to put it behind me. I will come out of this. I will move on. In a way, Bill's death might accelerate this.