"So maybe the life you saved is not your own. OK - you still saved a life and that's not a bad way to spend one day, or 56 days”. Governor Cuomo
As it turns out, by the summer everybody still felt sorry for me that I was still alone and it was painful to watch, I was told, despite my attempts to remain cheerful.
When you divorce you don’t only lose a spouse, you lose a whole life. You lose a community and must spend years building up a new one, or your community gets scattered all over the place. Now you are single, living a single life amidst couples.
I had had to spend the pandemic looking at the remaining pieces of my smashed life, because there were objects in the house that I couldn’t let go. There were the loose cobblestones of a Prague pavement, that my husband I had drunkenly absconded with on a vacation to the city, that take me back there every time I look at them. When I first came back to the house, I had been assaulted by memories: stacks of books on beer-making and vegetable gardening; a bed dressed in the same sheets that we had last slept in together; his laundry in the basket; even a pair of jeans hanging over the bedroom chair and a bedside table filled with scraps of scrawled notes from a defunct life. I had thrown out all that, but now I had to find a way of living with things I wanted to keep.
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