More Letting Go

My wife and I separated more than three years ago. We’ve both moved on with our lives. The initial intense grief has faded to the background. Even after all this time though I find I am still healing. I am still letting go of what was, and each step in that process reawakens the grief that I had hoped to have left behind.

In February, while going through a box of personal items I had tucked away, I discovered a large pile of letters, cards, and notes that she had written me over the years, dating back to when we first met and began our dating relationship. At first I opened a few and reread them, then quickly realized that this would lead to even more intense emotions than I was already encountering. The cards spoke of undying love and devotion, of how I was the only one for her, how she couldn’t imagine life without me. That’s the way love often feels when it first awakens in our hearts. I doubt that any of us ever imagine that at some point we’ll be looking back at this “undying” love knowing that it did in fact die. It’s probably better if we don’t. But our culture’s obsession with eternal love, with finding the “right” one, with the myth of lifetime romance make it really difficult for those of us who don’t experience that – especially if we start out convinced that we will. It feels a lot like failure, failure that we’re ashamed to talk about. Failure that hurts to share. Failure because we tell ourselves that if we’d only been “enough,” if we’d only been more X, the marriage could have made it. But what if marriage isn’t always meant to last a lifetime? What if we allowed ourselves to express our feelings of undying love and devotion, while allowing space for the possibility that it won’t, in fact, last forever? Does that mean we are setting ourselves up for failure? Or does it mean we are being honest and realistic that life and love are complex and that no one can predict at 21 years old or at any other age, who they will be and how they will relate to this other person 20, 30, 50 years down the road? Because people change. And sometimes those changes are significant enough that staying together is no longer an option, that in fact it might be the unhealthy option.

Letting go after a marriage ends is hard. There’s no softening that reality. There’s a lifetime of mementos and memories to process. In the case of the letters and cards, I chose to release them in fire. This felt more cleansing than simply dumping them in the trash, which was my first plan. Keeping them was out of the question. Why would I want this collection that would awaken painful memories every time I looked at it? That they had lasted three years is due to the fact that I had tucked them away in a box 3 years ago because at that point I wasn’t ready to release them. Now I was. I had a little ceremony on my porch as I fed each letter, card, and note into the flames. The tears streamed down my face. It was simultaneously liberating and grief-filled. Another step in the process of letting go.

Sometime after I burnt the letters, I realized that I still had my old wedding rings. (We each had two because we got simple bands to wear when we moved overseas, lest they get lost.) In the initial grief of the divorce I had tucked them away in another box, out of sight and mind. At that time I wasn’t ready to let them go. Three years later the time had come to take that step. They had no value to me any longer. Actually, they had a negative value, because they were associated with a time that has past, with a relationship that is no more and will never be again. It took me a little searching to locate where I had placed them. Once I found them, I created a little releasing ceremony (at the suggestion of a friend) to let the energy associated with them into the universe. 

Then I found a jewelry store and sold them. It wasn’t about the money. I’m going to give that away, transforming the energy and memories represented by the rings into something positive. The day I went to sell them, some of my co-workers were in the office talking about divorce and how great second marriages can be, unaware that I was working through the grief of selling this core symbol of a marriage I no longer have. I had to step out of the room and let the tears flow.

I’d like to think that I’ve let go of everything related to my former marriage, but that’s not the case. Some things, like our two children, will always be part of my life and, in some sense, a reminder of what was. Other things may be hiding in old boxes, waiting to evoke another wave of grief as I let it go. Then there are the pictures, and all the memories they represent. I still don’t know what to do with them. Since our marriage started in the pre-digital picture era, I have old photo albums as well as thousands of digital images from a life that was and is no more. I can’t bring myself to delete and destroy them. Neither can I bring myself to look at them. Given my journey, it’s more than just recalling a marriage that no longer exists. It’s recalling a person who was me and yet was not me. I only share pictures from my past with those I feel the deepest trust and connection with, a handful of people in my life. Maybe that will change with time. This, like everything else related to releasing and healing, is a complicated process filled with a complex mixture of emotions. I can’t say there’s joy in this aspect of the journey, but I hold on to the belief that in the releasing I open space for new life and new growth.