A different way to look at dissolution

It just might be the most meaningful 29th wedding anniversary gift

Furniture.

Furniture?

Yep. That’s the gift you’re supposed to give or receive on your 29^th wedding anniversary. It allegedly symbolizes “the stability and comfort of a long-lasting marriage.”

If that seems a bit odd, try this one on for a worse fit:

My 29^th wedding anniversary is this Sunday. Our dissolution hearing is July 11.

That will forever be etched in time as the day the marriage died. Cue Don McLean… and they were singing, bye, bye…

It’s officially a Petition for Dissolution, not a divorce. I like dissolution better. Divorce has such harsh, negative connotations in our culture. It’s like you got a big fat F on your report card and flunked Love and Loyalty. It’s like a big gavel came down and a judge pronounced you guilty of a vows violation.

Dissolution? It’s a kinder, gentler splitting up. It’s as if the vows to love and cherish each other all the days of your life simply dissolved in a glass of water and disappeared into the rest of the water.

In a way they did dissolve. All the love we gave each other is still inside us, it built who we were and are over these past three decades.

Do I still get to say we were married 29 years even though he moved out in January?

Do anniversaries even matter?

Anniversaries are funny things. We rarely celebrated our wedding day. We just gave each other cards. But we always celebrated the day we met, December 19, 1992, as our true anniversary. Great. One more sad day to dread.

Or not.

I’m trying to rewrite and retell the story of this ending. Trying to see it as a completion of our karmic contract. Trying to call it what it also is: a beginning.

We used a wonderful mediator who I’d recommend to the world. Jim Robenalt at Next Page Mediation. I’m stealing a page from his playbook.

I’m a writer, so I want to call this a new chapter, not a failure. I’m just starting a new chapter of my life on July 11.

This last chapter has been a doozy. I just finished an 8-week long Grief Recovery Program at St. Raphael Church in Rocky River. Tom and Debbie, who shepherded a dozen or so widowed and/or divorced men and women through the grief process were amazing.

Some people don’t put divorce in the grief category of life — mostly people who have never been divorced or left by someone. I had no idea how hard a divorce was until I found myself in one.

The being left part hurts the most. Knocks the wind right out of you. Every. Single. Day.

Then you do the hard work that grief requires so you don’t get mired in it forever or trip over it in every future relationship. That work meant writing out a timeline of life losses. Then choosing one loss and going deeper. No enshrining the person; no turning them into a villain. Create harmony: acknowledge both the yin and yang. The good and bad. The mess and the magic. We’re all both.

Then you look at your part. Because if you don’t change you, you’ll repeat the ugly parts of your life over and over again.

Then you install recovery pieces: apologies, acknowledgements, forgiveness, communications that need to be delivered, not in person, but expressed on paper to set you free.

All those “if only” items, which can be summed up into one sentence: If only I had loved him better, differently, more.

When I completed our final grief group today, I felt lighter, buoyant even.

Maybe this last wedding gift we’re giving each other is the most meaningful gift of all: We’re setting each other free.

We’re giving each other a new freedom and a new happiness, the kind we could never give each other in these last years of marriage.

Freedom to take new routes in life. Freedom to meet new people. Freedom to go on new adventures, ones we would never have taken together.

It’s crushingly sad to see our long haul come to a screeching halt. I’ve wept more tears than I knew the human body could create over watching my bashert blow up. Our “meant to be” is no longer. Or maybe this, too, is meant to be.

I’m no longer meant to be married to him. Can that be holy, too?

So what do I do with this approaching anniversary? I dug our wedding vows out of the file cabinet and tried to read them but the words started swimming away. Too many tears. Rivers.

For now, I will tuck those vows in a special box I created the week he moved out. That week I collected all the best anniversary, Valentine’s and birthday cards he gave me over the years. I gathered all the photos of us that bring me the greatest joy and a few items he left behind that remind me of the best of him. I rarely open that box, but seeing it on the shelf makes my heart smile at the joy he gave me for three decades.

I filled another box, a much smaller one. I call it my God Box. In the days and weeks after he left, I wrote down all the pain, hurt, anger, fear and sadness. Words no one gets to read. Not even me once I’ve placed them in the box and surrendered them to the God of my Joy. They’re God’s now and God alone gets to remove all that clutter from my heart.

Most mornings I place my hand over the God Box and pray to release with love this man I always called my forever boyfriend, my biggest cheerleader, my partner for life. I wish him the best. Even when I really don’t, I say it until I believe it. Fake it til you make it, right?

I truly do want the best for him, even if it’s no longer me.

So maybe I didn’t fail at love.

Maybe the greatest challenge love asks of me now is to love him anyway. Love the person who once cherished me and love this person who left me. Love him enough to still carry his heart in mine, or maybe just a smidge of it, forever, until death do us part.

This dissolution? A piece of his heart dissolved into my heart all along and made my heart stronger. Opened it deeper. Stretched it wider. I wouldn’t be the person I am today had he not loved me these past three decades.

And I absolutely love the person I am today.

I may no longer be his favorite flavor of ice cream, but I’m mine.

Maybe on our wedding anniversary, I will simply give thanks that the love we gave each other dissolved into who we still are, made us who we will always be, better parents, better friends, better grandparents, better siblings, better humans for having loved each other for 32 years, and in some form, for forever.

I don’t need to know what that forever love looks like.

The imprint of his heart on mine will never fade. It might not grow any larger, but that’s okay.

He left a big enough imprint to last a lifetime.