Let me start with making one thing clear: death and divorce are not the same, not even close. Parting ways with a spouse because you believe your life will be better without them cannot compare to having the spouse you love torn from you, with no choice in the matter at all.
But marriages are not made up of two — they are made up of three. There is you. There is your spouse. And then, there is the marriage itself. And as it turns out the marriage is bigger and more important than either of you.
And that is why divorce comes with its own wrenching grief. The people who love you may be delighted that you have the chance to discover a better life now, they may congratulate you and they may believe that of course you are happy. Maybe even thrilled.
In my experience, at least, it doesn't work that way at all.
After I signed my divorce papers, I sobbed. There was no happiness, no relief, no looking forward to a different future — I just felt a crushing sense of loss.
When I signed those papers, I didn't just lose a husband. I lost my dreams. I lost a future that I had assumed would be there. I lost plans for the next year, the next ten years and the next forty years. One electronic signature wiped away the book that had once been filled with chapters that included holidays and trips and quiet meals and the next great adventure. The chapters included getting wrinkled and wearing my long gray hair in a bun while my husband and I read and rocked on the porch. One swipe on a computer screen and hundreds and hundreds of pages were only that — just pages, with no words to fill them. Suddenly I had a blank book.
And yes, I know some will say that is the point — divorce hands you blank pages that you can now fill with happier chapters, a storyline that is closer to fairytale than horror. And there is some truth in that. But remember — I never wrote a horror story in my head, and certainly not in my heart. The book I wrote was in fact a fairytale. Like all fairytales it included villains and dangerous journeys; I always anticipated that life would include impossibly hard times. But also like any fairytale, love always prevailed in the end.
The story didn't end that way. The blank pages I now held in my hands were just empty where once there wasn't enough room to contain all the moments of the future.
In some important way, the story didn't end at all. I never got to the ending because the pages were wiped away, never to be recovered.
We accept death as sad, as an inexpressible loss. Divorce is not death, but it is both sad and an inexpressible loss. Maybe you don't mourn the loss of your spouse. But you do mourn the loss of the marriage. Your spouse is the main character in all those chapters. But all those chapters are something even more important and harder to lose — they are the life you dreamed of, the life you planned, the life that you sometimes worried about and other times anticipated with sheer joy. They were your life until the very day you passed from the earth.
For those who experience divorce, you don't have to be ashamed of your sadness.
For those who love someone experiencing divorce, understand that your loved one is grieving. Because grief is a long and complicated experience and we need you there to see what is lost even when there is something gained.