I think this pregnancy it’s worse. Before I would dream that he had died in a horrible car accident, the kind of waking nightmare you have when your husband is twenty minutes late coming home from work and you’re stirring dinner on the stove and the kids are wild in the background and you wonder how you’d ever cope since he’s surely dead on the highway because he isn’t answering his phone and he hasn’t called to explain that he just had to finish that one application before he could leave his desk.

This time it’s always divorce, and it’s always much worse, and I wake up feeling so sick at heart. I feel, in fact, just like I felt in March two years ago when my mom called me before church and told me that Marcy’s husband had left her. Then, nothing we could say was any comfort. We all agreed it would’ve been easier if he had died, loving her.

Now, my sister is getting married this summer. She is different: stronger, not emotionally insecure. She’s not a doormat anymore, she can tell a guy to take a hike if he isn’t good enough for her, if he doesn’t love her and respect her as she now knows she deserves.

Her fiance is a very nice man. He’s divorced, also, with three kids, also, and they have lots of other things in common, including exes who make very nice villains of their separate pieces. I have seen him with Marcy’s kids, and he is as good with Marcy’s kids as my husband is with ours, or almost; some of that just takes time. He and Marcy are more alike in the ways that matter than she and her first husband were. I think, in general, that they will have a good marriage, if anyone wanted my opinion on it.

At Thanksgiving (the first time I met him and his kids) Marcy told me she had given him one of my posts to read (the one about how blended families can be beautiful), and she said she liked my most recent post (the one about the snowy day), because it had my usual blend of frustration with motherhood ending in acceptance and [joy].

And then she said that her fiance (who is the residential parent) used his wife’s blog against her in the custody hearings. I quickly joked that Dick wouldn’t ever have to do that — he knows if he ever left, I wouldn’t dream of fighting him for custody.

But I can’t forget that conversation, at 4:18 in the morning when I’ve woken with the copper residue of fear in my mouth and the tearful certainty that in reality my husband would never, ever leave me, and more, if he ever did, that he would never take these words of mine, these words that I have labored so strenuously to deliver, honestly, onto the page.

Because there have been times when I resent my children, when I resent motherhood, when I think what could have been if I’d pursued my other dreams instead. And if I thought my husband, my Tom, who in our first year of marriage, ever since that tender beginning, labored beside me our final year of college, when we holed up, side-by-side, stopping only to eat and drink and talk, once in a while, to share the questions and answers we were so elegantly, passionately weaving into our papers and essays, if he were to belittle and demean the offerings of my heart, however so pitiful and inadequate they are once sprung from my short fingers, I would never be able to forgive him. I would know, finally, that he didn’t understand, that he never would, never had, never wanted to, and how could you ever stay married to someone like that?

Of course divorce is always betrayal, and it’s a better betrayal than the betrayal of self or of the children one swears on one’s life to love and protect, and the question of who betrayed whom first is one that only God and the families of the first-betrayed really care about anymore. And sometimes it is a betrayal forced though the first-betrayed would have forgiven anything if only the betrayer would reconsider.

I remember thinking, right before Tom and I were married, that marriage wouldn’t be such a significant, and potentially joy-giving institution, if it weren’t also such an unfathomable risk. The more of yourself you commit, the more you stand to lose if you are betrayed; if you commit less, there is less to be betrayed, but also much less to make the marriage worth desiring. Total giving of self, of merging of dreams and hopes and plans and subduing of extraneous, give-up-able wants, is vulnerability defined, and also the only hope for making a marriage so good, so life-sustaining, that the thought of losing it, fueled by raging fetus hormones, is enough to make one wish it were morning and no longer night.

I just finished reading Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order. It is fantastically well-written, and, like the best writing, both original and yet completely inevitable. I felt that the “index” organizing scheme wasn’t entirely successful, but I appreciated the metaphor of not being able to organize thoughts on something as traumatic as suicide in any totally coherent manner.

Wickersham, with Mozart-perfect prose, discovers her father has shot himself and then circles back and back, like the ripples from a pebble, trying to understand the why. But I had a why of my own.

Why should I care? Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 people commit suicide in the United States every year. It seems self-indulgent and morbid for a brilliant writer to spend seventeen years obsessing over her father’s. And why should I, a reader who likes a good dollop of romantic escapism in her free time, spend 316 pages reading the (no matter how exquisitely-rendered) stark, painful accounts of a brutal childhood, a financially-failing adulthood, and, finally, the suicide of someone so removed from my own life?

Though I resisted caring, it was compelling, and so I recommend The Suicide Index without reservation. It’s a stunning piece of writing, and, to anyone who has ever known a suicide (noun, verb, adjective) or who has ever felt like a failure, it offers, if not soothing comfort, a wealth of understanding and not-aloneness.

Still: Why? My second reaction is Why not? Should not every life be examined in such great detail? On the one hand we can shrug and dismiss this particular suicide in light of all the others and all the other tragedies, petty and catastrophic, that occur everyday in every country. Or, we can hope and demand that each life, each choice means something, matters. Wickersham succeeds in making me care about her pathetic father and selfish mother, her supportive husband and her inconsolable self. I don’t ask more from a novel.

I did get one more thing, though. I finally figured out why it is so hard for my sister (and me) to come to terms with her coming divorce. Wickersham says of suicide: “When you kill yourself, you kill every memory everyone has of you. You’re saying ‘I’m gone and you can’t even be sure who it is that’s gone, because you never knew me.’” When you leave your spouse out of the blue, you kill every memory everyone has of you. You say ‘I want a divorce’ and we will never be sure who you were, because, obviously, we never really knew you. Even if we are not as surprised as we should be.

On the very last page, Wickersham remembers what she first thought on hearing that her father had shot himself, and it is exactly what I thought myself on the 16th of March, a Sunday morning four and a half months ago:

“Oh no,” and “Of course.”

Divorce, it seems, is not so different from suicide. It is the killing of one’s marriage instead of one’s self. And if that marriage was an intrinsic component of one’s self, one’s perception of one’s self, it is almost worse than death.

And so, even though I thought the “index” organizational scheme wasn’t perfect, it’s a helpful way to catalogue my sister’s husband’s leaving:

The Divorce Index

Divorce
announcement of
necessary “strong language”

We are rushing to get ready for church. My mother calls. She knows when our church is, and I imagine she suspects how frantic we are at fifteen minutes to nine. She tells me she and my father are at my sister’s house, and that my sister’s husband has left her. I say, “That f—— b——.”

announcement of
to my sister

I would prefer a big fight at the end. My sister does not get that. One day he loves her and the next he is gone.

death and

I cannot imagine Dick leaving me, but if he did, I know it would hurt less if he died, “loving me.”

dreams and

The only thing my sister ever wanted is to be a wife and mother.

factors contributing to

?. If I understood, I would probably be able to make small talk with him again.

feelings of disgust and

The day before he leaves, Saturday, my sister and I dress our younger sister up and take pictures of her with our six children. He is working, and then he comes home for dinner. My parents are there. We eat lemon chicken lasagna my sister has made. I sit next to him, on his right. I drink one of the special Barrel Brothers vanilla rootbeers he stocks especially for his guests, for me. We talk running strategy. He runs marathons; I’ve just finished my first 15k. He is charming, friendly. I worry sometimes that my sister is unhappy, but I think he will never leave her. He loves his cars and his iPhone, but he is not a bad person.

impact on my children and

My 3-year old daughter asks if she will be getting a new daddy soon. My girls wonder why their aunt is crying all the time. My 7-year old asks, when Dick and I argue, if we are going to get a divorce now, too.

state of my sister’s heart and

Broken.

state of their family and

Destroyed.

timing of recovery and

Like any mourner, my sister has good days, accepting days, and she has days when she thinks she will never laugh, never relax, never be happy, never understand. She will probably write 316 pages in her journal before she is done.

And I think, “Oh no,” and “Of course.”

—-

*Updated*

I have changed this post as much as I can to respect my sister’s privacy. One thing about this whole situation is that I have hurt worse over this than I did over my miscarriage. The miscarriage made sense. The baby was a mistake, God didn’t intend for me to have that baby. Divorce, in this case, still doesn’t make sense to me, and it hurts, because I liked and trusted him, too.