A dissolution is a doorway to a new life

Today I got my wings

Time of death?

9:15 July 11, 2025.

Time of birth?

9:15 July 11, 2025.

When the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas magistrate pronounced our marriage over today, it was like that moment in hospital shows where the emergency room doctors stop trying to revive the lifeless body and pronounce the time of death.

Only this is both. A time of death and a time of birth.

Today I lost the love of my life, my spouse, my partner, my cheerleader. Our marriage is officially over.

Today I got my wings. From here on out, no matter who does or does not come along to love me, I claim me as the love of my life.

I am flying solo into life.

On today’s page in the meditation book I read every morning, Ernest Holmes wrote, “There is an inner life of complete perfection that exists at the center of everything.”

Everything.

Even this.

Even in a dissolution. Even in a divorce. Even in the death of all my dreams of happily ever after and all those promises of a forever love that would last until death do us part.

As soon as the ten-minute Zoom court hearing was over, I went to my meditation room to pray. I lit candles then burst into tears. Did I blow it God? Did I ruin this marriage of 29 years that was supposed to last forever? I wept, but just for a few minutes. I’m just about out of tears. I’ve cried buckets since my husband left me in January.

That little girl inside wept out of that old shame of not being enough, of not being worthy of love, of being too broken to be loved by someone forever.

But the loving parent in me that I’ve worked so hard to strengthen in counseling, said No. No more of that. Don’t let her shoulder this. She gave it her all, wounds and all.

When you survive trauma as a child, you tend to love people a bit clumsily in life. It’s so hard to trust love, and then you do and get hurt, and all those wounds open wide to swallow you whole.

Not going to let that happen.

What I heard in the quiet of my heart was a gentle, tender voice, that Holy Spirit voice that speaks if you grow still enough to listen. That voice that comes as peace and tenderness, counsel and understanding, never fire and brimstone.

It said, Well done, my beloved. Well done. You competed your sacred contract. You completed your circle of loving him. Now go love you. Love you better than you ever have.

Then I grabbed a pen, because the only way I process anything in life is by writing. Words have saved me ever since I got my first diary in 5th grade. Writing has been my forever companion. The words flowed out in this vow to myself:

Regina, I will love you all the days of my life. In sickness and in health, in riches and in poverty, in doubt and in faith, in despair and in hope, in sadness and in joy. I will love you fully and completely until our next life together.

Then I put my hand over my heart to keep the love from leaking out. My heart has a lot of cracks, which is how the love and light both enter and leave. This heart — and yours, too — is strong enough to hold both sadness and joy, both doubt and faith, both despair and hope in a future that is a total mystery.

And what makes it a mystery is the not knowing how it will end.

I don’t know how it will end, but I know how it begins.

On new wings.