There’s a death in the pit of your heart.
Buried.
Deep under the surface. Below the cracked and ruptured exterior. Below the visible. Below the invisible. It burrows down, waiting. Waiting for the seismic wave shaking the foundation of your life to subside.
For the pain of your divorce to level. For your love to scab.
Time passes. And it waits. If you were to know where to listen you could hear it, whispering through the debris. Calling out.
A death you failed to register. A death you failed to realize.
And not just one death. Several. Dozens. More.
All crying out to you.
Because while the weight of a relationship’s end pushes you down, it’s not until later, months, if not years later, that you discover the emotional genocide that went unnoticed. But once it’s discovered, you can’t turn away from it. And there’s nothing you can do to save what is now lost.
The loss of your in-laws, and the mutual friends now gone, their backs to you. Leaving you behind. Because in the end, it wasn’t them that was buried.
It was you.
A Burial You Didn’t See
The swirling tornado of your mind when going through a divorce has a dizzying effect. It’s often impossible to see what’s around you. To know what destruction might happen next. You’re sick and exhausted and yet it continues.
It’s hard enough standing on your own two feet when going through the end of a relationship. One minute you might want to punch a hole in the wall. The next you want to crawl into that hole and never relent your hiding place from the world.
You think of how your life is changing. How your future plans are gone. How your past is broken. It’s exhausting and tiring and maddening and nauseating. And yet you have to focus your attention on it.
It’s why you didn’t see the other losses coming. The other losses mounting.
And yet, as the falling of your relationship distracts you, other relationships sneak away behind you, often without a sound.
Friends may choose sides, slipping into darkness without a word. You’ll always have the alliance of certain close allies, but others may surprise you. Especially when you turn around and find certain former friends are nowhere to be seen.
While the loss of some friends is small in stature compared to the loss of a marriage and its intertwined future, even a paper cut stings. Especially when accompanied by dozens of others.
For me, it wasn’t the loss of these friends, but instead the loss of an adopted family. Because this loss doesn’t only disappear without a sound. They narrow their eyes, flick out their serpent tongues and spit venom before turning their backs.
And not necessarily because they want to. Because, in the end, no matter what the other person did, they will always be family with the departing spouse. Cans tethered to the bumper of a car, just divorced.
The Casualties Of Relationship War
When a relationship fails there’s, eventually, a tunnel you can look back through and see where things went wrong. What contributed to the problems. What magnified the flaws. You can see who did what. You might not like the outcome, but you can at least understand how it happened.
That’s not the case with the loss of your adopted marital family. You didn’t cause the erosion of these relationships. Many likely stood by you until the end, which makes the sudden loss of these people so hard, even if you don’t feel their loss for months after the divorce.
Unlike former friends who drift apart, fate points in-laws in one direction, and you the other. Sometimes I feel as if sabotaging the end of these relationships is for the best, as at least it gives some form of closure, even if conjured and anything but organic. I did so with my mother-in-law. I saw the end coming. An opportunity to forcibly dissolve our connection presented itself, and I took it.
The same opportunity did not come from my father-in-law. He wrote me a letter before radio silence consumed any connection we once had. In the letter, which I have never shared with anyone, he wrote, “So sorry things are turning out as they are. As someone who’s been near the marital equivalent of hell, I know what you’re going through and more...(eventually) I had to re-discover myself; things I enjoyed before no longer brought enjoyment and friends were no longer around. The good news is that I put one foot in front of the other and slogged my way through it. I wish things could have turned out better for the both of us, but we don’t always have control over our emotional destinies. Hang in there, and keep in touch.”
The end of a relationship is a difficult death to live with. You’re left with old memories and fading love. And even with that, in the end, the loss of an entire second family is often more difficult to handle.
Even if it takes a while to discover.
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