Fork in the Road

NYTimes: Divorce after 40 years

Quite the column in the Times today, by Terry Martin Hekker:   " I was predictably stunned and devastated when, on our 40th wedding anniversary, my husband presented me with a divorce. I knew our first anniversary would be paper, but never expected the 40th would be papers, 16 of them meticulously detailing my faults and flaws, the reason our marriage, according to him, was over.

We had been married by a bishop with a blessing from the pope in a country church filled with honeysuckle and hope. Five children and six grandchildren later we were divorced by a third-rate judge in a suburban courthouse reeking of dust and despair."

And

"No jilted bride could feel as embarrassed and humiliated as a woman in her 60's discarded by her husband."

And

"...divorced" doesn't begin to describe the pain of this process. "Canceled" is more like it. It began with my credit cards, then my health insurance and checkbook, until, finally, like a used postage stamp, I felt canceled too."

WOW.

Lost--and found

As I rediscover myself, posts like this one get my attention--the writer is remembering giving up the part of himself that wrote--and the part of himself that loved men. Married and a father, he had to bury aspects of who he was--
"The journals. I threw away the journals. Years of journals. In an attempt, I only now recognize, an attempt to kill them. To kill parts of myself. All those journals, those simple spiral bound notebooks, the overwrought teenage prose, the insecure young man, the questions, the doubts, the steps across boundaries, out with the trash.

Then they were gone. And I forgot that night. I forgot the impetus, I forgot the feeling of relief at having them gone, I forgot the need to examine, to express, to expand.

Until I couldn't forget any longer."

Unfurling: A closure of sorts

Unfurling is moving away, from one flat to another.  He's moving on from the landscape of his (failed) marriage:
"I won't sleep in this room, in this bed, again. The room where my wife and I had sex. And then the room where we didn't have sex. Most important decisions are made, between two people in bed. I learned that to my expense. I've spent about 1400 nights in this place, and gone from optimism to great sadness and now reaching a new flavour of resigned optimism. A closure of sorts."