I feel like I’m entering a new phase of grief. And this one’s not in the books. I call it “the breakup”.
Really, its like breaking up with your lover. I’m pulling back a little bit to protect myself, and my own feelings, and I’m starting to think, “she kind of used me.” There’s so many dimensions to it, but today, I was cleaning out some stuff from the office, and there’s like piles and piles of shit from her stuff. Of course all her clothes, and stuff like that. We’re working through it a little bit at a time. But other stuff, not important, not sentimental, just piles of it. Tons of textbooks and notes from college classes she took years or in some cases decades ago, and there’s a whole saga to that, but never mind. All kinds of crap: scribbles on paper, her work stuff, get well cards, ancient bills, printouts that went wrong somehow, but never got thrown out. Just massive piles of stuff of all kinds.
And now she’s gone, and here I am, still cleaning up her mess. And from time to time, I’m overcome with anguish, and if you want to know the truth, I’ll tell you, there I was rolling on the floor, clutching my gut, just bawling and emitting sounds that were kind of primal in nature, if you know what I mean.
I made this decision early on, that I was not going to avoid the pain, I was going to look right at it, I was going to drink deep of the cup of grief, in the hopes that taking my medicine would be the best way to get over it.
It’s worked in a way, but this path ain’t for everyone, let me tell you. It’s rough. It’s passionate. It’s real. And you know, it turns out those words describe Anita and me — our relationship, our love, our life, our sex life, those three words sum it up pretty well. From the beginning right up to the very end. And beyond, into this nether world I now inhabit.
But there’s some liberation involved in all this too. I don’t have to bother with the eternal arguments of what to keep and what to toss. That’s one reason why we have so much of it — argument avoidance. And now, I’m kind of in a mood to toss most everything. Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure I’m still sane, and I won’t do anything rash, but the end result is a much more open, lighter feeling. I feel unburdened by tossing all this crap, mine too, and giving away all the salvageable or recyclable stuff to the goodwill, and wind up with a cleaner, more spacious, more comfortable space for me. The new me. The single, solitary me.
And so the first thing is the breakup. The way I feel now is like she left me. She flew the coop. Like the old cliche, “it’s not you, it’s me. it’s just time for me to move on.” And she left me here crying, with two kids and a big pile of bills. No, really. Just like when we started out, Anita was nothing but a bottomless pit of need. Oh, I could cite you chapter and verse, and I would do if there was the slightest point. But never mind any of that, because now she’s gone, and all that is in the past. Or almost. We’re getting there.
Digging out of the debt we got into when we had more pressing business at hand than to worry about everyday finances, and fighting the collection agencies, the hospitals and doctors who can’t figure out their own billing systems, the greedy bastards can’t even grasp their own marginal competence, or their own contractual relationships with our insurance company. I am so right, they can go fuck themselves.
Anyway, they did such a great job she wound up dead, and after that, they send me bills that are egregiously in error. Wow.
Oh, it’s not their fault she wound up dead? Yeah, its not mine either. But I’m the one who get’s stuck with the bill. I was just standing here, when a star fell from the sky and knocked me pie for a loop, and I fell in love. So shoot me. Who knew there was a bill attached to that shooting star? Heads up, lovers.
And that’s the other part of all this, that now I feel like old Rip Van Winkle, just waking up after a thirty years’ dream. Oh, I had moments of lucidness in there. But now, well it’s a different feeling.
And I’ve talked to a couple of friends about this, and you know I’ve been kind of surprised at what I learned.
It’s sort of hard to know where to start. Let me start here: I hate all couples. Old couples especially, but young couples too. Even couples in trouble. Why do I hate them? Because God has so ordained it: “there went in two and two … the male and the female, as God had commanded.” Because we are all just leaves on a great tree, we beings come in complementary forms: physical, emotional, spiritual. Some of you know what I mean and some of you don’t. For the latter I have nothing but compassion and love. Brothers and sisters, I feel moved to preach. But let me restrain myself for now. Let me say that you can try to reason it out, you can try to explain it away, but the power of love as it was meant to be is overwhelming like an ocean wave. There is no discussion, nature is manifest. Simply observe the power of creation as it silences all argument.
But that’s not at all what I want to talk about. There’s this discovery I’ve made. Being single sucks. At one level its like middle school lunch room. What table do you sit at? All our friends, practically everyone we know is paired up into couples. Even when they mean well, and invite me over for dinner or whatever, its like one or two couples, … usually all mournful and pitiful, … and me.
What kind of social setting is that? The pressure is unbearable.
And then I’ve got a few single friends, and they’ve all figured out or are somehow managing to cope. I ask them, and they say things like, “I’ve learned to do lots of stuff by myself.” And of course I didn’t say it, but I’m like, “yeah, but what about sex?”
Or a friend of mine was finally able to admit, “I felt kind of funny hanging around with you all after the divorce.” You see back in the day, he and his ex-wife, and Anita and I had a lot of fun together. And we endeavored to maintain our separate friendships with each of them throughout the difficult process and over the years. But he said that afterward he felt uncomfortable when he was with us. Like a third wheel. But now that he and I are both single, well, it’s just a little more symmetrical. I totally know what he means.
And I could go on, but the point is that none of this other shit has anything to do with grief. It’s just the bullshit of being middle aged and single in a world that wants couples. And what are we going to do about it?
Sometimes we all speak in codes, but I’m coming from a different place just now, so I’m going to put it on the table. Sometimes you hear people say things like “society expects you to come in a couple.” But that’s not what I feel at all. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I could give a crap about what society thinks. No, it’s not society, it’s fundamental nature that drives me to seek human companionship.
And here’s the discovery. I have found that apparently society does have something to say at this juncture, and several people have told me explicitly that it’s too soon for me to get involved, or that I could get involved with someone as long as they met certain parameters, was suitable and of a certain age, and didn’t know anyone we already knew because that might be complicated, and of course don’t even consider trying to meet someone online, that’s for losers. “Do it the old fashioned way”.
Ha. It’s kind of funny when you really see it. There’s a lot of angles to it, but the bottom line is that despite what people say, and how they all claim to wish there was something they could do or say to help, if there ever does comes a chance where you might actually be able to do anything about it, maybe get a little joy and happiness back in your life, even if you can overcome your own guilt and conflicting emotions, people pull back, or start judging you even for just thinking about it.
The other day, someone said to me, “guys who get involved with girls younger than them, the girls have always been neglected, and they have daddy issues.” And here I am sitting there thinking, “what the hell? how can you have the slightest notion of what potential psychological issues a purely hypothetical individual might have, based on the imaginary possibility that she might get involved with someone not within the approved age bracket?”
Oh, there’s more, but it doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is, as the grieving begins to dissolve into just plain loneliness, and we try to separate out these different strands of emotion, and I look around for people who aren’t just wringing their hands, wishing they could do something to help, what I actually see is quite the opposite.