the evolution of grief

i guess there is something to this idea that grief comes in stages.  mine is ever-changing.  it is amazing how beautiful a thing it can be, how tender and human and fragile, and how defining.

the night i left my eventual wife's apartment having confirmed her pregnancy and learned of her unwillingness to carry the child to term, i looked into my own eyes on the drive home in my rear view mirror and i saw tiny cracks, micro-crevices, really.  it occurred to me perhaps i had arrived at the threshold of middle aged.  perhaps this is where things turned downhill, when vulnerability set in. 

i was in my little, black, two-seat sports car, with the top off on a winter evening.  the cold did not warrant having the top off but i hadn't realized that when i set out.  i stopped at a traffic light in the left hand turn lane, and a truck pulled up behind me with bright lights set high enough above my trunk that i suddenly had a rectangular spotlight shining on my forehead. 

i looked at my eyes, around my eyes at the lines, mostly at the one line between my eyebrows, that curved like a miniature bolt of lightning upwards.  i had formerly liked this line.  i thought it gave me character, perhaps it imbued me with an air of thoughtfulness i fancied.  now instead of quickly disappearing it was leaving behind a slight crease.

i thought of all she had said to me.  she said she had enjoyed being out and alone recently and that she really liked her apartment.  this was to tell me she was comfortable and intended to go spend a season away from me. 

to that point i had pushed her away plenty in the past, then upon sensing her gaining her footing and making her way without me i would pull her back to me as forcefully as possible.  i employed every bit of guile and charm i could muster.  i preened and paraded like a peacock.  i wrote her poetry exaggerating her every aspect.  i made love like we were on fire.  i sought to impress her at every turn.  i meant to convey generosity and goodness and high ideals always. 

you see i needed that over the top sensation from her and from all the other girls, too.  i am not saying it was okay.  it was tragic.  i say it matter of factly.  i am a product of my conditions and i equated drama and ardor from multiple relationships to real love.  i think what happened, and it is hard to know being so close to all of it, is i had a need to be needed which resulted from my being moved around as a child from family to family and not knowing my mother's love, (or my father.)  i was an agreeable child because i was always on the make, that is, trying to endear myself and make myself super attractive in every way to any and everyone for whatever reason or purpose.  i had very few limitations in this regard.

the result was that as a single adult i spent a great deal of time in pursuit of, or rather, gathering, as many admirers as possible.  also, as i progressed through my 20s and into my 30s the pretty girls just got younger and younger.  i rationalized my behavior by telling myself my love relationship would be the most important relationship of my life and therefore getting it right was paramount to my success.  when my behavior became duplicitous i flirted with boundaries.  i played games with words and planted verbal traps. 

i only know i did these things now.  at the time i believed it all.  in retrospect i was pathetic but at the time i was serious.  even the word games.  i would plead for more time or certain understanding, empathy even, believing i was worthy of those things as this could be just the most important relationship ever.  i was convincing, too.  at certain times i may have had some level of involvement with even three girls, one at the end of the cycle where the break-up was taking hold but there was some leeway and i could talk my way back into that relationship if i was so inclined, (which i might be at least often enough to keep that person holding on some,) one in the middle of the cycle, the official girlfriend who i was then in love with and whom i spent a majority of my free time with and who was my regular lover, and one on the front end of the cycle who i might just be flirting with or perhaps exchanging emails.  this was not a formula i employed like some sort of sick don juan but rather it was a cycle i can only now identify. 

now in the late stages of this cycle after a great deal of proverbial water had gone under the bridge, i found my eventual wife wavering in her ardor and devotion for me.  she carried our child, which she would later suggest i had planted purposely when we were both blind drunk, but said she would end it and that she didn't know about us right then but she was going to think about that and try to create some distance from me in order to think clearly. 

i drove home that chilly night slightly devastated.  i had also noticed recently that girls were not looking at me as they once had.  those darling buds of 20-25 were looking at me like i was a contemporary of their fathers, and at 38, i was. actually, i was not devastated, i was stoic.  i remember getting home around 11pm and resolving not to be emotional but rather to know that i still possessed charms and to assume she was not the ideal person for me so i should go to sleep so i could be fresh for work the next day so i could impress and thereby take care of the one constant in my life, my steady job in customer service where somehow i had found enough favor to maintain the position and steadily advance in spite of my unconventional appearance and my occasuional lapses of propriety.

right after my alarm woke me my phone also rang and it was her saying she had a change of heart and that she was ready to go for it with me.  i was perturbed because of my own resolve of the night before and at the same time i showered and drove into work that day in an odd state of euphoria feeling like my life was changing and this was momentous, (which of course, it was.) 

now she is gone.  i mean, she is down the street and we have children so we're in touch but the marriage is over.  the paperwork remains but everyting is else has cleared up. 

i remember now shortly after we were married she would remark on her own wisdom relative to some of her friends for having chosen an older man, (11 years, one month and 22 days,) a man who was ready to settle down.  at the time i took it as an affront.  i thought i was such a great choice that someone in her position could only reasonably assume that older was in and of itself the wisest choice.  i thought she had done so well for herself in me.  i was virtuous, youthful-relatively speaking, intelligent and interesting.  of course all of those assessments were reviewed through my most narcissistic of lenses.  for her part she was making a case for the union because she felt one needed to be made.  i was not the only one in the relationship who practiced self love and she too, poured it on thick.  she considered herself to be exceptionally cute, and she was.  still, her opinion was inflated.  her remark was meant to explain how a fairy of this extreme magnitude of cute could possibly be with someone like me, a slightly older man of average pulchritude, and for her physical beauty was and is king.  whatever is second is so distant in it's relation to this characteristic as to be laughable. 

when we first began discussing separation she proclaimed her virtue by saying she wanted me to be happy.  in fact she thought it would be great if i met a girl closer to my own age to be involved with.  i don't think she said it with malice but it felt malicious.  again she was attacking my physical appearance.  apparently i was very old for her.  in those early days i thought she was simply mistaken as i like hot girls who tend to be younger.  now i don't know.  mature girls seem perfectly attractive.

when my wife said she thought i had practically tricked her into being together i took exception.  i thought that was ludicrous.  now, i am not so sure.  i did see the lines on my face.  i remember that.  i was getting older, indeed my argument to her that night in her apartment had been to state plainly i was getting older and for me it was easy, i was ready to settle down.  no perfect match was ever going to show up.  rather i realized the key was to be committed to working it out and i thought she and i had a substantial foundation on which to build.  she seemed to accept this argument as her own in some regard the next morning. 

i don't know if the accepted stages of grief are in fact my stages of grief.  instead i feel like i am in the bad stage of grief, which actually feels like it is down the line a ways and not really that bad of a stage.  i see so many bad traits in her now.  i don't think she has much in the way of a motherly instinct.  she has enough and she certainly loves her children but she also fancies herself the party, fun girl.  she takes pride in being that and generally needs a lot of reinforcement when she is drinking from those around her to reinforce her indulgent behavior.  sometimes when i look at her face i think she has a porcine quality.  i see the bad in myself too.

one of her reasons for leaving was that she did not think i was doing enough as it related to the daily responsibilities involved in raising children, that is to say; household chores and childcare responsibilities.  while i admitted she did more i attributed what i perceived to be a slight difference to children being somewhat more drawn to their mother than their father, most likely due to temperament.  she said that since she was doing it all anyways she had come to realize that she could do it so she might as well.  ironically, i had once thought i needed to let her feel stranded or alone on a decision from time to time as she seemed so dependent and unwilling to handle basic responsibilities that i knew she was perfectly capable of but she lacked the confidence to do so.  this revelation too, cut me.  it seemed to suggest she had already endured the relationship for a season from some need to have me around to handle life's difficult stuff.  this kind of enraged me at first, (in an earlier stage of grief, perhaps.) 

i see now all of my behaviors which sabotaged this relationship.  i tried to get us to talk and to work on our difficulties but she would not.  i tried to have state of the union discussions but she balked or complained after an hour or so that it was going on for so long.  i tried to proactively suggest we take steps to recreate intimacy betwixt us at which point the reason for our distance would morph from her being angry at me for behaviors from long before we were married to her feeling like her body had changed since she had children and she just did not have any sex drive.  still, in spite of those occasional forays, i did not do enough.  i could have tried harder.  i could have met her where she was but i was too proud.  at the very least i had to have middle and in looking back, i don't think she was ever capable of the middle. 

my grief changed again recently.  it is heavier and feels like a permanent defeat that will consume a fraction of my personality forevermore.  it also feels like it is passing, like a piece of myself that had gone down so low as to be imperceptible to myself is somehow emerging again, floating past the defeat and surfacing anew.  i am still a little angry and sad but i am also found.