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The Death of a Marriage
by Cameron Conant, excerpted from With or Without You
March 22, 2006
I enjoy visiting cemeteries. It's a strange hobby, I realize. It's not something I do often, but when I'm near one, I enjoy walking around, wondering what these people's lives were like: Who did they love? Who loved them? Did they accomplish what they hoped to accomplish in life? What were their last thoughts before they died?
I especially enjoy visiting the oldest graves. Sometimes I'll crouch down and read the chipped engravings. "What year was that? What was their name?" I carefully wipe away the dirt on the engraved lettering. I think about the day the person died. I wonder what the relatives said, I wonder what friends whispered in quiet moments, I wonder who was never the same afterward … I wonder.
And I always wonder if anyone ever visits these old places. Some of the graves memorialize people who died so long ago that they've been completely forgotten by everyone. Even the people who loved them are now dead. No one visits; no one brings flowers or flags or remembers the important dates in these people's lives. Generations later, it's as if they had never lived.
I remember at least two occasions when my wife and I spent time in cemeteries together. One of those times was a few months before Sara left. The day was overcast and cold—the kind of day when you stuff your hands deep into your pockets and your shoulder muscles tense involuntarily.
On this day we drove down narrow cemetery roads together, talking about death. I asked Sara whether she would want to be buried or cremated. The question hung in the air. I could tell that she didn't want to answer. But when I asked the question, I remember thinking that I should listen carefully: What if Sara dies before I do?
My perspective has changed drastically since then. If she died today, would I even be invited to the funeral? Even if she died, would that be the official end to our relationship? Our relationship seems to go on and on, no matter what I do. Our souls seem forever entangled despite the months that pass, despite the changes in our lives.
She is still a part of me, and I am part of her.
A friend of mine who has been divorced said, "I don't think you ever really get over it." We wondered why that was; we wondered why the world reacts so differently when someone physically dies. When someone dies, friends and family bring casseroles; they travel from afar to attend funeral services. They send cards and notes of encouragement and make phone calls. They join you at the cemetery and mourn. Their very presence brings healing.
So why is it that when a marriage dies, people do nothing?
When my marriage died, I was left on a ledge with little to no support. Friends and family didn't know what to say, so they often said nothing. No one visited; no one sent cards.
But when someone dies, there is comfort for those who feel the loss. There is a tangible, physical reminder of the loss. There is a body. There is a tombstone. There are ashes, rituals, prayers, community. It's obvious that I will never get these things; it's obvious I will never have the same comfort that widows receive.
But what about community? What about the group of people who sat at my wedding—the people who agreed to support my marriage? Where are they now? I still see their faces, smiling and laughing. I see them with glasses of champagne. I see them handing me wrapped gifts—pots and pans, pillows, other things that are now shoved to the back of cupboards and closets. Things that I would gladly trade for a hug or a phone call.
Today, these wedding guests are only a memory. Today, they are like passengers on the Titanic, celebrating while a disaster that they know nothing about is on its way. I wish my wedding guests were around to support my marriage, but communities have become fragmented. The people who attended my wedding live in dozens of cities around the country, and most of them never knew there were problems in my marriage until they heard about my divorce.
Most of them probably know now, but what should they say? What should they do? I don't know. They don't know.
And so I am relegated to the old parts of cemeteries—the parts no one remembers, the parts no one cares about. The parts no one visits, the parts no one acknowledges.
Perhaps I might feel more peace—more finality—if there were a gravestone marking the death of my relationship with Sara. But all that marks the end of our marriage is sad memories. There is nothing tangible, nothing that I can kneel by and mourn over.
What if I created a gravestone? What if I really did it? What would it say? Maybe this: "Here in this place we put to rest our pain, our sadness, our happiness, our love; we mark it as dead. Here in this place we kneel and cry. Here we have a monument to our relationship. And that is all that we have."
I wish I could end this discussion on a more positive note, but I'm not sure I can because graveyards—whether they are physical or emotional graveyards—are places where things end, dead places. However, graveyards were never the end for Jesus.
Jesus cried one day after learning that a friend had died. Filled with emotion, Jesus walked to the graveyard, stood in front of the tomb, and said, "Come out." And the dead man came out. The greatest graveyard miracle of all happened three days after officials proclaimed Jesus dead—His followers found His tomb empty. They soon learned that Jesus had begun His new life—His eternal life. Jesus created new life out of dead things.
As sad as graveyards seem, sometimes they're not the end; sometimes they're the beginning of something else. So as I bury my marriage, what will Jesus do? Can something be reborn in this dead place? To be honest, I am so cynical and sad that I wonder if such a miracle is possible. What will come out of my personal graveyard?
Hopefully something that looks less like me and more like Jesus. Hopefully something that resembles a miracle.
Ignoring Our Death
I spent the first Thanksgiving after my divorce at my parents' house. It felt strange. There was so much that I couldn't share, so many things left unsaid. My divorce was rarely spoken of, but we were all aware of it. Sympathetic smiles at dinner, hugs that tried to convey words that aunts and uncles and cousins wanted to say but couldn't.
After dinner, we watched a film of my mother from almost fifty years ago. As I stood there watching the silent film, I realized how alone I was, how alone we all are.
In the film, my grandmother—the perfect 1950s housewife—tends to her children. She's wearing starched dresses and stylish jewelry, supervising birthday parties where all the right games are played in all the right ways. My mom—a beautiful little girl, brown hair curled at the ends—plays musical chairs with neighborhood children; it's a birthday party fit for an avocado-green suburban childhood.
My grandmother did everything right, from planning parties to instilling her children with the best of manners. But years after the children were raised—babies' butts wiped countless times, money saved, groceries bought, and meals cooked for years on end—my grandfather left. This seemingly perfect home—all the best appliances, the children dressed in all the right clothes—crumbled in an instant.
I don't sit in judgment of my grandfather. I don't know why he left. But I see how divorce has shaped my grandmother's life. Today, when her hip is hurting, she has no one to help her. Today, when she'd love to talk to someone, her dog and her television keep her company.
I saw the distant look in her eyes as the old Technicolor-style film rolled. She should be watching this on the couch with my grandfather, holding his hand, wistfully looking into his eyes, telling him that despite the hard times, she'd marry him all over again.
But my grandfather lives hundreds of miles away, and today he spends most of his time connected to an oxygen machine. He remarried a long time ago, but I wonder if he ever thinks of my grandmother; I wonder if he ever regrets leaving. I wonder what he would say, how he would feel if he sat and watched the film I watched that day.
How much does a single life affect another single life? Ask my grandmother. Ask my mom. Ask her three brothers. All of them have private pains, private hurts that will never fully heal.
I wished Sara could've seen me hug my grandmother goodbye. Grandma had trouble zipping her coat, so I helped her. And as I hugged her goodbye, she said, "I'm tired." And she was. Not just physically tired, but emotionally tired. Tired of being alone. Tired of her grandchildren playing video games and surfing the Internet when she wanted nothing more than to have someone sit next to her and ask her about life, about anything.
I hugged her for a long time and said nothing. But I wanted to say, "I know, Grandma. I know you're tired. I'm tired, too. I'm really tired."
I suppose that in some ways Thanksgiving was as happy as it could be. For as much as I wanted to bare my soul to my family, to tell them about my divorce, I'm not sure they really wanted to hear about it. We're all so self-absorbed.
I wish I could just do a better job loving my family, helping my family instead of looking for their sympathy. They have just as many dead places as I do—places that I know nothing about. And if I took the time to get to know them, maybe I would find that they are just as tired as Grandma, just as tired as I am.
Praying Our Death
We read Psalm 90 the other night in Bible study, which author Eugene Peterson calls "Praying Our Death" in The Message. It's an appropriate name, for we learn that death and pain are inescapable: "All we can remember is that frown on your face. Is that all we're ever going to get? We live for seventy years or so (with luck we might make it to eighty), and what do we have to show for it? Trouble. Toil and trouble and a marker in the graveyard" (Ps. 90: 9-10, MSG).
This entire psalm speaks of pain and death as natural parts of life, parts of the cycle of nature that are as inevitable as the changing of seasons. So why do we act so offended when someone dies or when something bad happens to us?
Someone in my Bible study group noted that it's interesting how we try so hard to "let God off the hook" by writing books that explain "why bad things happen to good people."
Yet this psalm seems to indicate that bad things happen all the time—and the psalmist doesn't try to defend any of us as "good," either: "You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence" (Ps. 90:8).
I don't mean to imply that all evil is ordered by God specifically to punish us. But it's an interesting—and not very modern—notion to think of evil and death as something we deserve by the very fact that we are all sinful. "All our days pass away under your wrath," the psalmist writes.
It's strange to think of how life must have been thousands of years ago when this psalm was written—when death and pain weren't obscured by modern hospitals and sterile waiting rooms, when people weren't kept alive on respirators or healed by miracle surgeries and wonder drugs.
People didn't die miles away in a hospital on the edge of town. They died at home, and people wailed and cried and ripped their clothes for all to see. They mourned publicly, not quietly in the catacombs of a modern hospital.
In our Bible study, we talked about deaths that we have mourned. We talked about deaths that have killed parts of us.
I thought immediately of a pastor I knew—Bob Gaddini—who always called me "bro." He was the type of guy that everyone loved—he had two beautiful children and a beautiful wife, and he was always laughing and smiling and playing pranks. He was in his forties when one morning he was hit by a car during a bike ride. The driver didn't stop to help, and Bob was found on the side of the road dead some time later. To my knowledge, they never found the driver who hit him.
One woman talked about the death of her brother. He was only nineteen when he got in the car early one morning with their mother. They were picking up their father, a railroad man who worked several hours away. On the way there as the boy slept in the front seat—glasses on, head against the window—a drunk driver slammed his car into the door that the boy leaned against. The boy died in his mother's arms. Later, her mother said that as her son gasped for his final breaths, she was transported nineteen years back in time, holding him as a newborn as he struggled for his first breaths.
I didn't tell my story, but I could have. Of course, you know it by now. The death of my marriage, the day I was left gasping for breath, the day I realized that if you pray enough and try hard enough and become "spiritual" enough, you still may not get what you want—or even what you think God wants.
I guess Psalm 90 makes sense to me. I feel as if I have lived it.
Yet the psalmist leaves us with a cry of hope. One of the last verses reads: "Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble …" (Ps. 90:15).
Yes, God. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble. Make us glad on this planet of tears.
Remembering Our Death
Lent is my favorite season of the church calendar because it reminds me of an important reality: Living the "Jesus Life" is not easy.
The Jesus Life is not the happy-go-lucky "Jesus is my homeboy" life that pop culture would have us believe. The Jesus Life is not the health, wealth, and prosperity life that television evangelists would have us believe. The Jesus Life is not the politically driven "us versus them" life that some Christian leaders would have us believe.
The Jesus Life was best expressed on a crude wooden cross: Nails. Blood. Death. Love. Forgiveness. Sacrifice. The Jesus Life is about going out into the world and taking up our cross as Jesus did and as He commanded us to do.
During Lent, we remember the sufferings that Jesus endured. We remember His final days on earth and ultimately His passion for the world, which is most beautifully expressed in the Stations of the Cross.
The stations are practiced not only by Catholic Christians, but increasingly by many Protestant Christians as well. The stations take us through the entire story of Jesus' final hours, from His being condemned to death on a cross to His rising from the dead.
As we walk the stations, praying and meditating on these various scenes from Jesus' final hours, we remember that "by his wounds we are healed" (Isa. 53:5). And strangely, though there are so many places that are sick inside of me, I can attest to the reality of being healed by the wounds of Jesus.
When I meditate on the wounds of Jesus, several things seem to happen: the cancer of self-centeredness is removed, the sadness fades, the pain becomes bearable, the ordinary becomes holy, gratitude increases, healing takes place. But because I am human, I will become sick again soon, and I will need to again return to the cross, to the scourging, to the sacrifice.
But even more than a prayerful, meditative exercise, Lent has become part of my history. In some small way, I now identify with Jesus as He cries from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46).
I now see that I too am called to take up my cross, to become humble to death, to love my enemies as Jesus did when He said of His torturers, "Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34).
Two years ago, I realized that my marriage was the cross I was called to carry, and my wife the enemy I was called to love. And by understanding this, I knew that I could endure whatever pain my marriage caused; I knew I could endure whether my relationship with my wife improved or not. I saw that pain was beautiful because I was in some sense participating in the sufferings of Jesus.
I was not only meditating on the Stations of the Cross, I was experiencing them in my own life in some mysterious way.
I suppose since Sara left, Lent has become even more important to me. I am even more aware of my need for Jesus, my need for His sacrifice, my need for His mercy.
Accepting Our Death
The other day I learned that a well-known marriage seminar was coming to town. "Learn God's plan for marriage," the promotional video proclaimed during the 11:00 a.m. church service. I sat in my seat, arms folded, cynically looking at the video screen. "What plan for marriage?" I thought to myself.
My wife and I had been to this particular marriage conference before, and nothing had come of it except more pain and hurt and frustration. Despite my problems with the conference, I think that it has done a tremendous amount of good for many couples. So why didn't I experience God's plan for marriage? Maybe it's because there's something wrong with "God's plan for marriage"—us. We're the problem.
We're selfish and sinful and unwilling to forgive, unwilling to live out the command of Jesus to turn the other cheek, unwilling to take a punch in the face and come back with a kiss. It's a hard thing to do, even for those of us who really want to love and follow Jesus.
There's another problem with "God's plan for marriage." There isn't a plan. Yes, there are commands and stories and teachings in Scripture that express God's desire for marriage. But a "plan"? No. Perhaps I'm splitting hairs, but I wonder if using this kind of language implies that having a great marriage is as simple as looking at a map or following a recipe. Take a left turn on State Street and then a right at the third stoplight and you're there! Start with some flour, add a little oil, some butter, salt, and cook at 350 degrees for twenty minutes, and voila! Flaky, buttery crust with minimal effort! Marriage is not the same as baking quiche.
I can't handle easy answers to difficult situations anymore, which is why I sometimes cringe at well-intentioned statements like "God's plan for marriage." And I'm noticing more and more that others feel the same way. Friends. Musicians. Poets. In the U2 song "City of Blinding Lights," Bono sings, "The more you see, the less you know, the less you find out as you go. I knew much more then than I do now."
I know much less now than I did when I got married—even after attending Christian conferences and reading dozens of Christian books. In fact, I can remember life as a senior in college: confident in my politics, outwardly confident in my faith, sure of myself and my abilities, self-assured that Sara and I had tackled every obstacle in our relationship, certain that all that awaited us was a life of wonderful sex and exciting adventures.
But like Bono, I must admit that I knew (or thought I knew) much more then than I do now. Now I realize that my politics don't always work or make things better; in fact, sometimes they're just plain wrong. I now realize that marriage is a mystery, not a paint-by-numbers way to sexual and emotional satisfaction. And now I realize that faith is the ultimate mystery—a journey with fits and starts, a journey with more lows than highs, a journey that never ends, even when we're ready for it to be over.
Standing above all of my problems—our problems—high above a world of self-indulgence and pain is not a president or a top military leader, but a humble rabbi from the Middle East named Jesus. God in the flesh. Emmanuel. God with us. He is so much greater than us, and His ways are so much higher than our ways. Yet He was one of us. He walked among us. And He loved unlike anyone has ever loved before or since—even those of us who never figured out His plan for marriage.
Speaking Our Death
I recently sat with a friend as she ate dinner. Unexpectedly, she began talking about the difficulties that she and her husband have faced, from having a child too young to a period of separation that they endured. In some ways her story resembled mine, and I hurt for her and her husband. She talked about how upset her husband was when they were separated, how he cried and pleaded, how she took him back.
She talked about not knowing if she loved him anymore, how she felt more like a mother to her husband than a wife. Today she wonders if she should simply end their relationship, if it's worth it—if they are really meant for each other, or if they are simply living out the consequences of having sex too young.
She wonders if she will regret staying with him.
"I just don't know if we're going to make it," she said matter-of-factly. "I mean, I'm still young—I still have my entire life ahead of me. I really care about him; I just don't know if I love him."
I noticed that as she talked about leaving her husband, she might as well have been talking about what to eat for breakfast the next day. Her disposition was cold, detached. She was mentally and emotionally exhausted, as if she had all but resigned herself to the fact that their relationship would soon die, or that it had already died and she was the only person who had noticed.
"He doesn't even talk about how he feels about things," she said. "We were separated, and then before I knew it, we were back together again, and we never really even talked about what happened."
I couldn't help but try to encourage her to work things out with her husband, to get to the bottom of what might be making her feel this way, to understand why her husband has difficulty sharing his emotions.
I tried to explain how so often I pointed the finger at my ex-wife, when in many cases I was the problem.
"I have learned that no matter what others do to me, no matter how many people I run from, I can't run from myself," I said. "I bring my own faults and bad habits and selfishness into any relationship. I can look around and imagine what another woman might be like—how wonderful she might be, how kind, how loving—when in fact, if I knew her, I mean really knew her, I probably wouldn't like her nearly as much as I imagine that I might, because I would find that unfortunately she is human, just like me."
I told my friend a story that illustrated my point. I once went to see a well-known musician play. Between songs a fan yelled, "I love you!" And this famous music artist paused and quizzically said, "That's because you don't know me." It was a profound statement from a man who has been through divorce, who has struggled with drugs, and who, according to one interview that I read, wonders if the universe really cares about him or anyone else. It was the sort of statement that I was trying to get my friend to understand and accept.
But before I could elaborate on the point and climb back up on my soapbox, this friend asked me if I was better off as a result of my divorce.
"Better off? Well, I've lost a part of myself. Part of me has died. I will never be the same, and I will always have to deal with that. But I guess I am happier in some ways, I suppose I'm more at peace with my own faults and imperfections now."
In hindsight, I realize that the best way I could have described to my friend how I really felt about my divorce was to have told her this: The one person I feel like I need to talk to is the one person I never will.
Excerpted by permission from With or Without You by Cameron Conant. © 2005. Relevant Books.
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