My wife Deborah and I have been together for twenty three years. That’s a great deal of peaks and valleys through the years. Many factors led to our staying together: good communication, love for one another with little strings attached, mutual respect. And dumb luck.
Marriage is easy. Until it isn’t. Divorce rates hover today at 46%. Take your average young person and add experience, education, relationships, health, travel, and growth. You get a different human being than the one you started with. Now pair them up with another being? Chances are we’re not looking at two lives on a parallel, but rather obtuse angles. (Bucket list: use geometry once after high school. ✔️). Life is a messy adventure. The quiet, magazine reader you married may turn around and announce she’s no longer interested in repotting the plants and taking the kids to violin lessons. She went skydiving over the weekend and now she wants to spend every waking moment skydiving. Do you like skydiving? Hope so, because your spouse is off on a new adventure now.
My brother Brian’s murder was our big, rude, unfortunate adventure. If all those movies and television taught me nothing, it’s this: when an adventure plops itself in your lap, it changes you. And my wife and I were both about to experience significant changes. The question was: would we both change in the same way? In a way compatible with sustaining our partnership? Let’s see…
—Right after Brian’s death, Deb thought we should be closer to family and move to Massachusetts. Deep in depression, I could barely get off the couch, let alone switch coasts.
—A few years later, my mother died. She had become collateral damage to the murder. It was my turn to want to move to Massachusetts. Deb wanted to stay put. She knew I was knee-jerk reacting to my then listless, aimless, drifting life.
—I developed an epic level of anxiety and fear. One night, Deb went out for coffee with a friend. We live right off of Sunset Boulevard. Our neighborhood’s always hopping at all hours with a lot of street guys and colorful characters roaming around. She planned on walking to the coffee shop three blocks away, and would be back in at 10:00pm. I asked her to call me if she ran late. She agreed.
At 9:00pm, she wasn’t home. I called her cell. No answer. 10:15pm, I called again. No answer. I called at 10:30, 10:40, 10:45, 10:46, 10:47. By 11:00pm, I had become hysterical. I picked up to dial 9-1-1 when she walked through the door.
“Where the hell were you?!” I attacked.
“I told you! Getting coffee!” she yelled back, utterly confused.
“You need to call me when you’re an hour late!” I said.
“Is this what it'll be like now?!”
It was like that. For a long time.
—I fell. A lot. Not exactly passing out. More like a “red-out”. I’d get dizzy and fall. Deb suggested therapy. I refused.
—During the murder trial, Deb volunteered to be the O’Neill family interpreter. What was this position? While my mother, father, and I left the courtroom, she sat through the gruesome, bloody details of the state of Brian’s wounds, and the step-by-step summary of how the grisly killing went down. Then she would interpret back the reports to us in G-rated language, “Now, when a stuffed teddy bear’s stitching comes loose…” So in the aftermath, she’d baffle me by flipping the channel away from Homicide Hunter and developing a weak stomach for my beloved films noir. Go figure.
—We became pregnant and reacted on opposite ends of the spectrum. Joy vs. stress. We miscarried while still at odds with our own feelings on the pregnancy.
All these quirky behaviors, this gumbo of actions/reactions in the years following our family’s circumstance challenged our marriage. Grief and sudden loss warps our brains. They’re warped better sometimes-- we can become empathetic, we can deepen our values and spiritualty. Other times, we warp selfishly and get small. You and the person sleeping next to you may share the same experience, but stagger through it in vastly different ways. I’m reminded of the play “Strange Snow” by Stephen Metcalfe. Two Vietnam vets come back home. One can’t shut the door on the past so he shuts up about the war and his feelings. The other lived through it, too. He can’t stop talking about the war and brings it up constantly.
My own parents lost their child. My father told everyone he saw. He talked to bartenders, store clerks, and people on planes. My mother took her grief inward, couldn’t find relief, and I believe she numbed out of her own life. She crumbled within seven years.
You hear about married couples losing a toddler, and they’re divorced within three years. Or a woman loses her spouse and remarries within two years, horrifying her kids.
I couldn’t control my tense, controlling edginess any more than my wife could control her desperate need to get back to normalcy and routine.
This is why I think dumb luck played a role. We grew apart with the experience of our loss, but with some help from professionals, friends, and each other, we found our way back to growing together.
We were dumb, and we were lucky because we didn’t realize we were widening the distance. We dug in. Deb couldn’t let this take her down and out. And I would not let anyone— including Deb— tell me that life goes on its merry way with a grand purpose. I had a pre-Brian life, and a post-Brian life. You couldn’t talk sense to me.
I think we eventually both saw each other’s reactions. We both wanted the pain to go away, and both had what we thought was the best ideas to do it. Once we realized that, we could practice some patience and kindness.
In the end, neither of us owns the instruction manual to any of this stuff. What works for me may not work for her. And going through it once, unfortunately, doesn’t dismiss us from going through it again. We’ve been practicing equanimity for a few years. It’s a work in progress. If we can’t come to acceptance with our circumstances, then the next best thing is to ride out the sorrow and heartache with loving kindness and do it without hurting each other or ourselves.