From This Moment On (52 page)

Recently I was reading Jane Fonda’s autobiography, and I had to laugh when I got to the part where she wrote about her painful divorce from media mogul Ted Turner. She confessed to having written several angry letters expressing things that, had she mailed them, she would have regretted later. But she knew not to send them, that merely writing down her feelings brought some measure of healing. Her advice: “Best not leave
everlasting
proof of your
temporary
insanity.”

She is so right, and I wish I’d read that bit of wisdom before I’d sent my venting letters. I suppose I did go through a temporary period of insanity, and my language reflected this. I used every hurtful word I could find to express my desperation and helplessness. After it dawned on me that this was permanent, and that neither my husband nor Marie-Anne had any intention of putting their families back together, my letters went from angry to pleading:

Please leave us in peace! Please! I’m begging you. I am so low,

so brokenhearted I can’t take it anymore. I wish you love and

happiness, but I am dying, and I can’t take it anymore. This is

killing me. Have mercy. I loved him so much, and I can’t cope

anymore. I don’t want life or love anymore. I just want peace.

Why are you torturing me? Let it go. Pleeeeeaaaaaassssseeee!!!!!!!

Okay: I wish I could have taken
that
one back. My pathetic pleading made no difference at all to Marie-Anne, but I had to try. Besides, the way I look at it, the letters that I did send were meant to be sent, and those that I stashed in a drawer weren’t. Under the circumstances, I’m not about to beat myself up for expressing my genuine anguish.

I admit I’m embarrassed about being so vulnerable, but I’m sharing it with you as a way of letting it go. If there is anyone who is going through or has gone through something similar, I want you to know that there is no shame in expressing your pain or even things that embarrass you. There is a time to force yourself to let go of your inhibitions in order to embrace new thinking, to share your feelings even if you have to force yourself a little. In fact, it’s harmful not to. So at the risk of making a fool of myself or being judged for indulging such vulnerable thoughts and emotions, I feel liberated in being able to laugh at myself, to laugh even at what once made me cry, to be able to say that I’ve grown and progressed toward a new way of looking at things. It’s like being able to admit that you were the one who farted.

I never considered harming myself, but I
was
harming myself—torturing myself, really, by trying to make sense of it all. What happened to me, and why? How could he? How could she? I’d been robbed of trust, love, hope, things that belonged to me, I believed. These thoughts held my mind captive day and night. In hindsight, I realize that I was trying to apply logic to love and desire—and what could be more illogical than that? I wanted desperately to turn my brain off, but I just could not find the switch. Jim Morrison once said about pain, “You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.” My emotions would not quiet; they were hurting me, and I wanted them to quit. I was desperate to shut them off, and I reached out many times searching for something in the dark to flick or push, anything,
but there is no such thing. You can pretend your pain is not there, but it is. It’s real, and neither you nor anyone else around you should try to convince you that it isn’t. Work through your pain, and you will get to the other side of it. There is no other way; shutting it off is not an option. The situation you are in may not be in your control, but your right to feel the pain from the affliction is. As humans, we cannot order emotion away like a naughty child. It’s necessary to allow ourselves time to feel our doom, that all is lost, if that is genuinely what we are feeling. We grow and learn from our suffering, so why let anyone take that away from you?

From the time I was a little girl, I would write my feelings out of me. Unbeknown to me at the time, this was a very healthy thing to do. Expressing my emotions in a song or poem really helped me to see things more clearly and come to terms with them. It was my way of working through and addressing them. But not this time. In fact, writing them out became a self-destructive exercise. I typed obsessively in endless circles about Mutt and Marie-Anne and me, each keystroke digging me deeper and deeper into the emotional hole I’d created for myself, so that now I was mentally drained in addition to being just plain sad, except when I put it all on hold when I was around my son.

However, as so often happens in life, something positive emerged from a terrible time: namely, this book.

I was writing in a frenzy every day for hours and hours, piling up tens of thousands of words, and yet the relief and answers I sought were as elusive as ever. I figured all I’d done was waste a whole lot of time.

Or maybe not. It occurred to me that I felt satisfied and rewarded reflecting on my life
as a whole
and had found the importance of thoughtfully writing it down. So why not keep writing? But instead write about the forty-two years that preceded having my heart broken and not just in an effort to empty myself of my current suffering. Writing about my entire life meant I could feel the creative fulfillment that comes from expressing myself, and it would interrupt my
preoccupation with the heartbreak I was trapped in. I didn’t want that one crisis to be what defined my life, as it was really only a
moment
in my life within a larger story. A story that deserved that I start … at the beginning!

The act of writing helped me regain some badly needed perspective. When you’re in the depths of despair—over anything; it doesn’t have to be a romantic breakup—it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that you weren’t always in this much pain, and the time will come again when that crushing sensation in your chest finally lifts and the weight of feeling that maybe you’re going crazy will dissolve. Grief is not a mental illness, even though while you’re in the midst of it, it may very well feel that way. I also understand that if I were feeling such despair not having had an
experience
of loss associated with it, then perhaps I should be more concerned about my psychological health. Fourteen years of marriage to someone you deeply love, and with whom you have a child, ended by an affair with a close friend? That’s something to be devastated by. But thanks to a great deal of reading about grief, personal struggle, and loss in my effort to climb out of my deep hole, I began to learn to be less hard on myself and to ease up on putting a time frame on my grief, while still keeping a healthy eye on it or allowing those who cared about me to do so.

In her book
Living Through Personal Crisis
, Dr. Anne Kaiser Stearns talks about the need to keep good friends and family around you in times of crisis. I chose a few descriptions from her list of what makes an “empathetic person” that I particularly related to. An empathetic person is someone who “does not shock easily, but accepts your human feelings as human feelings,” “reminds you of your strengths when you forget that you have these strengths within yourself,” and “recognizes that you are growing.” For those who do not have the rare empathetic person in their lives, this is a good reason to seek out a professional. Dr. Stearns’s advice is, “A well-trained professional is someone who listens well, with acceptance and without judgment. If more people had accepting friends capable of good listening, there would be less need for professional helpers.”

So I’ve learned that I need people who are good for me as I go through this healing process, as there are those who are bad for me. I realize it’s wise to remember that people who bestow suffering on you are usually in a rush for you to “get over it” so they can feel less guilty about the grief they’ve caused you. I paid too much attention to this in the first year of my marital and friendship betrayal crisis, allowing that pressure to make me question myself and my own state of mental health.

Here, another quote from Dr. Stearns on “Destructive People”: “The destructive person may harm you and complicate your mourning in a wide variety of ways. He or she … labels your feelings or behavior as ‘silly,’ ‘sick,’ ‘weird,’ ‘selfish,’ or ‘feeling sorry for yourself.’ ” She gives good advice to avoid placing ourselves in settings that are alien to healing.

Learning to avoid the judgment of my healing process by my husband and Marie-Anne was one thing, but part of that process was revisiting it through writing it down, so it became a bit of a vicious circle for a while. I thought that if I just kept writing it out, it would eventually be gone. The idea was to put it down on paper and forget about it. But it wasn’t as easy as that, although what I did find great about putting my story in words was that as the pages mounted, I could actually “see” the different stages of my life in a physical pile. I was able to measure the stacked pages I’d written about this awful year or so, and they were far outweighed (literally) by all the good stuff.

I wrote and climbed my way back up, one chapter at a time. Of course, autobiographies are not written overnight, so this would be a lengthy process, like long-term therapy, I guess. To get through those first months, I relied on a small group of family and friends who rallied around me and stayed by my side. These were my beloved, empathetic care providers.

Frederic was there for me despite his own emotional turmoil. A true, empathetic person through it all, he emailed me regularly once everything
was out in the open. He sent a quote to remind me I was not
really
alone, when I felt I was, as none of my friends or family could get to me in the first days after I found out the bad news that my marriage was over. This quote could not have come at a better time: “A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.”

Still, I thought,
Finally, Easter is over, I’m facing the new reality that my marriage is over, my friend is my husband’s new love interest, and I’m struggling to cope alone.
Stacy was finally able to come to Switzerland, but only several days after I got the bad news, which felt like an eternity. Those days alone with Eja were terrifying and desperate, and Fred’s calls and emails comforted me and kept me going. Mary then came to take over from Stacy as soon as she could get to Switzerland from Canada, so I wouldn’t be alone.

With the affair right under my nose, I needed time to catch my breath before I could cope with the reality that it was real. I refused to accept it overnight. I resisted it and demanded that it stop, explaining to both of them that it was cruel, ruthless, and unfair, but my pleas fell on deaf ears. I begged for compassion, but it didn’t come. I felt as if my marriage was dead but still warm, yet there was already dirt being thrown over the grave. I couldn’t take both those hits at the same time. Reality does not wait for you to catch your breath, and when you are reminded of what your new reality is, what your loss is, and your lack of control over it, it’s natural to panic, over and over again, with each reminder, in the initial weeks of mourning. I’d have periods of the day when I was calm and able to function, going in and out of episodes of shock, numbness, and weeping. The song that came to mind regularly during that initial period of battling with acceptance was Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”

It’s a couple of weeks after the bad news, and I have an emotional breakdown while having tea with Mary at a nearby café one afternoon. This was my true breaking point, which sent me back to family and friends in Canada. As we were talking about the painful scenario, everything just hit me harder than I could stand, and an
intense flood of emotion came over me, till I was hardly able to walk the short distance back to our hotel without Mary supporting me. My knees kept giving out from under me. Mary reminded me that no one understood the situation as deeply as Fred, the other victim in all of this, and she urged me to go to him to talk. But we had no real contact or relationship at this point, and besides, he worked long days as international operations manager for the worldwide coffee company Nespresso and rarely got home before eight in the evening. If only my family were here and not halfway across the world. I called him anyway, and in short, panicked breaths, hyperventilating, I tried to explain that I could not take it anymore. From his cell phone Fred told me, “Meet me at my place. I’m coming right away.”

Fred’s office was a good thirty minutes away. I walked about halfway to his apartment, where he, Marie-Anne, and Johanna had lived together for the last year, and just—froze. My purse slipped from my fingers and fell at my feet. I stood there, hanging my head; there was no more life force left in me to move another inch. I’m guessing that I remained there, statue-like, for at least a half hour. I was conscious of everything around me: the warmth of the sun, the birds chirping and swooping and circling above, the joggers breezing by me, the spring poppies and tulips on my left, the rowers gliding silently by on my right, the dramatic snowcapped mountains shining like beacons. Baby strollers, walkers, talkers, bikes, dogs—all going by in both directions, blurry, as if seen in my peripheral vision. The only thing in focus were my own two feet. I could not lift my head. My heart holding my thoughts and my thoughts holding my heart, neither of them strong enough to snap me out of it.