How My Ex-Wife Taught Me to Walk Through Open Doors

It all started with ayahuasca about ten years ago. The choice to take this psychedelic plant medicine in the jungles of Peru eventually lead me to my ex-wife, Jenevieve. Almost a decade later and we’re faced with a divorce in the midst of a pandemic.

In the span of four or five hours, in my initial sitting, I was given a unique glimpse, an ego-less perspective, into my past life, my present life and my future life. I saw what had shaped me up to that point, I saw what I was faced with in that current state, and I saw what I needed to do with my life, to move forward, to heal.

Ayahuasca has a tendency to do that, to shred time up. Our dear time, all we know—a construct we’ve created to make sense of our lives in this strange, too-big world. Linear becomes circular. All paths become known. Humanity reaches transcendence. And presence becomes a feeling felt deep down in the seat of our soul.

You’ve heard this story often. A privileged Western man invades Peru in search of a heavy dose of enlightenment. I could say that I was taking ayahuasca before taking it was cool but even saying that makes me sound like a privileged douche-bag, someone who didn’t learn a thing from the experiences. I’m not that though. I’m just a human trying to find answers: on who I am and how to be. And not let those answers slip away from me with fear-based distractions and escapist addictions.

But I gotta be honest, even being the Western man I am, that wasn’t my intention, to seek enlightenment. I didn’t know what my intention was. It was an un-thought decision at the time, it was more felt. And what it felt like was a first step on a path that I was always meant to walk down. It felt like a calling.

I went to Peru. And by mere mention of it from a tour guide, ayahuasca came into my life. Having some bare-bones knowledge about it beforehand, I made the choice to take it. I came out the other side with a true recognition of the anger, depression and PTSD that was giving me back pains since childhood. A heavy load weighing me down that I was now conscious of and no longer just operating from.

I had apprehension going into that first ceremony, loads of it. Lots of questioning the shaman and tour guide in broken Spanish. They laughed at my fears, one after another. “Will I die?," I asked. “Does it feel like death?" "What happens to my ego?” “Do I become one with something greater and lose my past self?” “Do I lose control?”

Their laughter, it wasn’t because they were poking fun. It was because they truly didn’t understand where I was coming from. My perception, my cultural conditioning, how I grew up in Western society, all of it informed fears that were very different from their own.

It was so commonplace in their culture to connect with spirit on a daily basis, to swim with the Amazon current, that the death of a precious ego didn’t even register as a valid fear for them. They already lived with more presence than I was ever able to muster in my 24 years up to that point.

But this story isn’t about me. Or it’s not about only me. This story is also about a woman who has inspired me time and time again, helped me to shed my crippling, self-limiting beliefs, transforming me, forcing me to step through my shadow, my ex-wife, Jenevieve.

I wanted to paint that picture first, of my path to her, to spread some fairy dust, so you can understand how much magic went into our meeting. And how through forced consciousness expansion, aided by big, painful life changes and plant medicine, we were able to meet each other in our most fateful, vulnerable yet powerful, states.

Flash forward two years.

Two years after ayahuasca in Peru. Two years after a hard split with my ex-girlfriend. Two years after deep cognizance of my childhood pains, all ready to forge a new life with these hard-fought realizations. Two years of now knowing more about who I was, so I could figure out who I now wanted to be. After all this, I finally met Jenevieve.

We met in a red desert, much like Mars, only with a giant, lone cottonwood tree by a meandering stream to remind us we’re still on Earth. The American Southwest to be exact. 20 some odd people gathered that weekend, some friends, some new acquaintances, some whom I didn’t know at all. It was a sight to behold when I arrived at sunset. Modern-day hippies in Burning Man attire, scattered about on top of a ridge, hands at their sides and palms open, staring directly into the sun—a practice I later found out was called sun-gazing.

What we took later on that night gives you a different kind of charge than the sun. And it wasn’t exactly ayahuasca, either. It was essentially the same powerful, hallucinogenic, sky-rocketing, world-bending, ego-killing experience, yes, but the base plants were different. Technically this plant medicine is called Syrian rue. But for the psychoactive-plant-uninformed, in normal conversation, I skip over this fact and let it exist in the listener's mind as ayahuasca for the sake of brevity.

Nightfall, a bit after blue hour, faint light slowly starts to fade into oblivion on people’s faces. The ceremonial fire was just beginning to spark, everyone was gathered around with their sleeping bags and blankets, ready for the long, kaleidoscopic sleep.

And then headlights flash across our campsite, high beams, darting back and forth across sage-covered hills. Dirt kicks up, a car door slams and Jenevieve is revealed through a dust cloud as she bravely walks up to the ceremony group by herself not knowing a single soul but one acquaintance.

I didn’t know much about Jenevieve at this point, if anything. I hadn’t met her yet. My friend Kevin knew her though. That’s how she found out about this whole ceremony. He asked her out of the blue to come down and join. They met once on a modeling gig together years before. Kevin had already experienced a dozen or so ceremonies. And it came up in conversation. They talked. Jenevieve expressed interest. And Kevin remembered their conversation years later and invited her.

Looking back, Jenevieve and I were both seeking something new, to do something different with our lives. We wanted to transmute our fears from the self-fulfilling prophecies we’d been hypnotized by for years and into some form of lasting, conscious, willed happiness. You know, climb out of the cave, away from the shadow puppets on the wall and see what the real world is all about, breathe the wild air, feel our being.

I was longing for connection at this point in my life. A hard break-up and a lot of inner work makes you long for a deeper connection than just partying around town like I was for two years. I did the inner work but I was definitely indulging in 20-something escapism for a time. I just wanted something more, to put energy into a new relationship.

Jenevieve was on the heels of a divorce. In fact, she had just signed the papers prior to coming down to the desert. That’s why she was late, she had to rush home and pack up for the five-hour drive after making the insane yet courageous last-minute decision to say “fuck it” and go to the desert to do some mind-bending drugs with complete strangers.

After returning from her car to grab her gear for the night, Jenevieve made her place four or five people down from me and quietly introduced herself to everyone around the fire. As the fire grew, the stars we saw grew in number, too. Way more magnificent and heart-opening than you would imagine. To be able to see a million-fold stars like that, away from all the city lights, it only added to the experience, made it more surreal.

Silence fell upon everyone as they waited for their paper cups filled with Syrian rue to reach them. One by one, down the line, we all drank the very queer, very nausea-inducing, very ancient-feeling liquid. As we sat and awaited our undoing we began to see the fire’s movement change. And then one by one, we go from sitting, to being knocked flat on our backs by the sheer weight of Syrian rue’s presence in our bodies.

Once you let it flow into your system it’s a huge feeling of unease, of no going back, of giving up all control, of “oh fuck, what the hell did I just do to myself in the company of all these strangers with no lifeline or cell service for miles?” At least that’s what I could feel Jenevieve feeling, already tapping into her journey.

I lay my heavy head down, under the big cottonwood tree, and watch the fire dance and cast shadows on the cottonwood’s massive trunk.

Shadows slowly turn to manifested creatures. Creatures quickly turn to psychedelic nightmares. All of it in a rapid rush to kill the ego. The sooner you release all comforting labels and known faces and all subjectivity of the only reality you’ve ever called home, the sooner you can purge, let go of these nightmarish visions, and start down the path of transcendent catharsis. Destroy to rebuild. Kill to live. This process often repeats itself, coming in waves, huge, massive, seasick waves.

During this process, Jenevieve and I shared visions—that’s not uncommon on psychedelics. When you purge the ego and dive deep into the extremes of the existential now and the collective consciousness of those around you, you can share visions and thoughts and symbols and feelings. Energies become intertwined.

That was the case with Jenevieve and I, except our shared experiences seemed super-magnified, our energies inextricably locked on to each other. More so than I’ve ever experienced with anyone. We existed in the same visions for a long time. The two visions we kept returning to the most were that of a ticking clock and an open door. I didn’t know what those meant at the time. All I knew was that I was positive she saw the same visions as me.

Suffice to say we pushed stars around the rest of the night. We felt all the vibrations. We experienced death, rebirth, and rewind. We saw lizards combing their perfect pompadours in tiny mirrors and walking around in the very cinders of our burning vomit. We saw our physical selves lying next to us clear as day, not mirror reflections, actual us’s, opening a rift into a parallel dimension where our other selves were on plant medicine at the same time we were, manipulating movements independently, blinking at separate times, true, honest, living and breathing separate selves.

This story isn’t one primarily about psychedelics and visions though. I could drone on in excess. I just wanted to get to this place, the magical place I talked about before, where we met, Jenevieve and I, and our lives changed for better and for worse, with wisdom and heartache gained, with gratitude found and lost, with all life and love lessons wrapped up in one careworn package.

Jenevieve left the next morning before I could muster up enough courage to flirt with her, or ask if she shared the same visions as I did. All I could offer was help in packing up, some snacks and a few superficial adjectives about our experiences the night before.

After some pleasant goodbyes with the group, she left with a banana and a handful of pistachios I gave her—choice, gas-station sustenance for the ride home. The rest of us camped out the whole weekend. Two more nights of consciousness-expanding punishment.

A couple weeks pass, still buzzing, and I couldn’t shake the feeling of being utterly smitten by Jenevieve, spiritually and physically. I decided to reach out to her on Facebook. I explained who I was in case she didn’t remember. I mentioned how intrigued I was by her. And I invited her out for coffee.

It wasn’t considered a date at first. But we hit it off so well that I took her out for dinner afterward. Then we went on a walk. And by the end of the day we had a full date officially locked down. It wasn’t just sparks either, it was a goddamn atomic bomb. Humor and hearts align. Still no talk of shared visions though. I felt apprehensive to bring them up. To me, it was just an internal knowing that I tapped into her journey, not a perennial truth existing between us yet.

Later that summer, on a hot, dry night, after a couple solid months of dating, I texted her, asking if I could share something important with her via phone call. Her curiosity piqued. But we couldn’t talk just yet. She had to put her six-year-old daughter to bed first. We planned to talk in about an hour.

I look at the clock. The phone rings. I’m anxious to bear my soul. I throw my sneakers on and run out the door. She asks what’s on my mind, extreme interest in her voice. As I pace up and down the sidewalk in front of my apartment building to calm my nerves, I tell her all about my visions, the ticking clock and the open door, explaining that I felt like these were her visions as well as mine. That I felt like we dived into each other’s journeys.

She was taken aback. She remembered, yes. These were her visions, too. The power and symbolism of which we could only surmise at that point. Tick, time for us to walk through this open door together. Tock, time for us to push stars around in this new universe that we’re building as one. Tick, time for us to shed old stories and walk down a new path. Tock, time for us to bathe in this unknown, beautiful, blinding light together, the one we’re naked in front of and silhouetted by, the one shining through this open doorway. We're at the door. Then a whisper: Walk through.

The phone call didn’t end with these revelations, either. She told me more. She told me that earlier in the day when she was at an event for her daughter’s school, she saw two little blonde-headed girls running around and playing without a care in the world, with the most extreme presence. She was struck by them. She felt an overwhelming sense of love wash over her body and spirit. And she thought of me immediately in that same moment.

About a year and a half earlier Jenevieve made the decision to leave an unhappy marriage, signing the divorce papers on the same day she went down to the desert where we met. It was hard for her, the marriage. She loved him, but it was hard. Having a child when she wasn’t ready. Staying with him for longer than she truly wanted to, scared she couldn’t make it on her own. Her pregnancy six years before that was even more difficult. It was a painful, traumatizing experience, both for her and her baby.

Her daughter was born premature and due to birth complications, she was only able to make it out of the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) with half her intestines. She’s healthy today, with a big scar across her belly, only needing to take B12 shots once a month and stay away from certain foods. But at the time Jenevieve didn’t know whether her daughter would live or die during those first few months.

And with all this pain that she was carrying in her body and spirit for years, she didn’t know if she wanted to have a child again. She was even reluctant to marry again. Too much pain and uncertainty to bear yet another time around. "Until I met you," she said.

After telling me about these two little blonde-headed girls, she expressed that she felt the strong desire to have children with me. To create a family. To try again. That seeing these two little blonde-headed girls in real life felt too much like plant-medicine visions to be ignored.

I knew the significance of that heightened feeling in a sober state. And I was overcome with that very feeling when she told me. I didn’t think much about having a child up until that point, at least not out loud. Two alcoholic, abusive victim complexes parading as parents will make you second guess starting a family. But after sharing our visions with each other, my love and connection for Jenevieve expanded beyond measure. My heart exploded.

A year or so later, I proposed to her in that same red, Martian desert, next to that same Earthly, meandering stream. And she said yes as she swung on a makeshift swing hanging from one massive and mighty cottonwood branch. We climbed a ridge and sat in silence a time later, reflecting on our good fortune, basking in the heat of our desert love. Three months after that we happily found out she was pregnant.

We willingly had a short engagement and our wedding date was weeks away at this point. I had a good job as a copywriter at an in-house staffing agency. Though, I still felt apprehensive and nervous about the future as any man should under the imminence of life-changing responsibilities. About finance. About right decisions. About measuring up properly.

With so many new beginnings in motion I didn’t want to fuck this up. I didn’t know how to ease into this role of being a step-father, as well as a father, and a husband, too. I never had a good example myself, far from it.

Then a major shift.

A couple weeks before our wedding I get a call at work. Jenevieve is bawling, not able to form complete sentences. I listen to her words as carefully as I can but they don’t register. “We lost our baby,” she says. She has to repeat this same string of words a few times over for me to fully grasp the gravity of the situation. “We lost our baby...we lost our baby...our baby’s gone.” “I’ll be right there,” I tell her. Click.

I rush to her as quickly as I can. She was at the hospital already. I remember walking down a very claustrophobic hallway. Or at least it felt claustrophobic. I see peoples’ mouths moving, and babies visibly crying, but I can’t hear a thing, every sound I should be hearing is muted. My attention is solely locked on Jenevieve, one-point perspective, smack at the end of this Kubrick corridor.

I finally reach her. Her face is buried in her hands. She looks up, face beet red and tears flowing. I grab her by the arm, pull her up and give her a hug. We sit down and I console her as best I can.

I don’t remember much else about that day. We probably went into an exam room. We probably talked to a doctor for a bit. We definitely got medication to help her miscarry the rest of the way, to induce labor, essentially. The doctor, the nurse, the midwife...whoever, had given us the choice to either do that at the hospital or at home. We chose to miscarry at home.

Back at home, hours slip by. We’re lying on the floor together, moving from bedroom to living room to bathroom, existing in surreality. Once the time came, she didn’t want me in the bathroom with her. I lie down outside the door for hours as I hear deep moans and cries, not able to do much but just bear witness to her courage. She passes our seven-week-old baby, the little being is barely recognizable. We bury our tiny love in the backyard.

Obviously our world was crashing down, but Jenevieve bravely marched on. She got right back on the horse and continued to plan our wedding full steam. I don’t think she was ignoring what happened. I just think she needed to focus on a goal, something tangible, something controllable, something real.

We married a few weeks later. The wedding took place on a friend’s family farm, in a secluded meadow, shrouded by big, blue mountains.

Right before the ceremony Jenevieve called for me. I went into the house next to the secluded meadow where she was getting ready. She was just standing there, in front of a large bay window, magnificent, beautifully sunlit with halos around her, beaming with love.

I know grooms aren’t supposed to see their brides until they walk down the aisle but I’m glad Jenevieve asked me to see her. It was a quiet moment. It was our moment. And she knew that we needed that.

During our ceremony, two wild horses ran off in the distance behind us as we were giving our vows, un-choreographed and unplanned. Light rain fell on our faces to remind us that it’s okay to cry. It was a small, intimate wedding ceremony with close friends and family. Our shaman was the officiant. Kevin, who made our very meeting possible, was a groomsman.

Our reception was a blast. It was held in a white, turn-of-the-century barn made from the innards of an old ship. To set sail with our loved ones in this way was magical. We danced the night away, thankful to each other, thankful to our families, and me thankful to the universe for a wonderful woman and the celebratory day she planned for us.

Six months and one honeymoon later, our lives are intertwined and in full swing. Still reeling from the loss of our baby, we find out that she’s pregnant again. We’re ecstatic but cautious, ready to make all the right decisions. We felt that the first miscarriage was a fluke; now, we were meant to right that injustice.

But at about eight weeks into our second pregnancy, she wakes up with dizzy spells. She starts bleeding. And we soon find out that we’ve lost yet another baby. She wanted to howl, and she did, but she still faced the miscarriage with all the grace in the world. Her spirit, though downtrodden, was always unwavering and resilient. And we needed the warmth of her resilience, because we were about to face the cold for a while.

This cycle of loss repeats itself for seven more years. Some of our babies last a few weeks longer but ultimately most are around 8-12 weeks when we lose them. And with every single one, Jenevieve has to face the intense pain of those miscarriages alone. I’m there, as much as I can be at times, but no matter what, physically, she goes through the miscarriages alone.

I go through a significant drinking spell after the third miscarriage. This was a few years in. It lasted for a while, knocking back a few shots of bottom-shelf whiskey every other day to drown out the grief and anger, pushing these second-hand emotions down, where I couldn’t share them with anyone, most importantly, with Jenevieve.

Because of this and other poisons, we eventually start becoming more distant with each other. The magic we entered into was quickly exiting without any hard, conscious work to keep it there, togetherness became separateness, consciousness became escapism, freedom in love became blame and restraint. All spells that Jenevieve put on me and me on her in an attempt to control the act of breathing instead of allow it.

And every time she became pregnant again we got close again. I know I did. Hope is a powerful thing. It’s blinding. But looking back on it I see the pattern we had clear as day: rekindle and retreat.

My step-daughter was caught in the middle of all this. Our turmoil. To lose baby after baby, once or twice a year, made it even harder for me to fully invite her into my heart, even though she was just a little girl. To fully accept that role of being a step-father while I was being denied that cosmic gift was a hard pill to swallow. I see the irony. And I wish I had been a better step-father to this day. Jenevieve understood my pain. Wrapped up with her pain, she still understood.

Loss after gut-wrenching loss, the rift between Jenevieve and I grew. Even with marriage counseling, the unresolved pains of our respective pasts started surfacing again because we weren’t working on ourselves anymore. With all this miscarriage pain we were dealing with, taking us from lovers to enemies one day to the next, from trusting each other with all we’ve got to locking our hearts up behind our chests, never to fully re-open them again, how could we find time to remain conscious with each other? How could we overcome our past? How could she stop screaming? How could I stop yelling?

Still we kept trying, loss after loss. Because we wanted it bad. We wanted the future we planned. We wanted what the visions ordained. We were hypnotized. We felt we deserved our own child. We felt it would repair us. These were unspoken sentiments but we felt it would take us back to the magic of how we cared for each other in the beginning.

Admittedly, in this fight for our child, Jenevieve fought harder for it the whole way through. She felt it was her fault we were losing all our babies. It wasn’t. I fought, too, but I wanted a breather after a while. I just didn't know how to say it without it sounding like I was giving up.

Still she called specialist after specialist, near and far. She changed her diet time and time again. She made an effort to calm her heart and reduce stress levels. She took a few new supplements and medications every single pregnancy, and got rid of a few supplements and medications every other. Whatever safe, proven or unproven method you’ve heard of to aid in the growth (and birth) of a healthy baby, Jenevieve tried it over the course of eight miscarriages.

We named our first two babies even though we didn't know their gender yet: Jude then Sophia. Then after the third loss we stopped naming our babies for a while, for fear of getting too attached. We’ll always remember them, all of them. They meant everything to us. We felt their little energies growing inside Jenevieve, each one so distinct and deserving of life. They were all very much alive to us and very real. They were our babies.

Looking back on it now it all seems like a blur, a bit of time slippage, where we tried our best to hold onto each other’s hands as we fell through a wormhole.

We still lived and loved during this time. And there were plenty of happy times. Countless family trips to the movies, camping trips, road trips, summer walks, family get-togethers, 4th of July’s, Thanksgivings, Christmases, snowboarding day trips, Halloweens, school events, mountain hikes, making love over and over through the years, backyard dinners, Sunday breakfasts, running home from the grocery store in the rain more than once, getting a puppy, moving into a new home, getting another puppy, all life stuff, really, really good, positive life stuff. We lived and loved together.

Quite occasionally, though, I unconsciously kicked and screamed along the way. Despite moving forward, there was still a theme to our arguments, I still felt a huge void in my heart. A void that Jenevieve kept trying to fill with all her strength, love and wisdom but she just couldn’t. We even got tested fertility-wise and according to modern medical science, we should have been able to have a baby together. The numbers were there. The biology was there. But it just wasn’t happening.

At our sixth loss, wading through a sea of despair, we decided to take an indefinable break from trying for a baby. It was necessary. We seemed to be at each other’s throats, for anything and everything, more than we were giving each other the safe space we needed. We weren’t thriving. We were barely surviving. No longer remembering what it felt like to look each other in the eye and find love beaming back.

At that point I started my own freelance video production business after quitting my job as a copywriter. I put the pen down for a while. My focus turned away from our relationship and I frantically buried myself right in my work, a career move, yes, but a distraction, too.

Jenevieve opened up a business as well. She opened her doors, about six months after I did, as a wedding and event florist — a damn good one, too. After she spent years clawing at a career as a fine art painter and graphic designer she chose to become nothing else but a florist.

She can give you all sorts of answers about how she got a degree in horticulture or how she worked in a botanical garden when she was in her early 20s or how she grew up in the wilds of Alaska and wanted to reconnect with her wild spirit. I think all of these reasons gave her decision meaning but deep down I know it was that she needed to create something beautiful for herself alone.

After all that loss, she needed to know that she had life-giving power, the power to birth something from nothing, to plant seeds, to grow flowers, to give flowers, to forage, to stick her fingers in the earth and feel the language of life: that mother-loving power that is too often taken for granted.

So, understandably, we buried ourselves in our businesses for an amorphous amount of time. And then some time later, we bought a home, with so much thanks to Jenevieve and her dedication: for her undying desire to make the essence of a home a reality for her daughter.

We rekindled after moving in. Something happened deep inside us where we really saw each other again, our love bloomed a second time. Through this pure and newfound passion we got pregnant. For the seventh time. It felt real. It felt honest. It felt different. It felt like it was actually going to happen. We figured it out: all we needed was a home to welcome our baby.

We find out it’s a boy. We hear his heartbeat. We see him growing for weeks inside Jenevieve’s womb on the ultrasound. We name him Ronin. By about the twelfth week, the doctor tells us in the kindest way she can, "I think something is different about your baby...he's showing tell-tale signs of having Down syndrome." But she doesn’t think, we can tell she knows.

We were devastated by this news. With everything we had gone through we just wanted a “normal,” healthy child. I know that sounds selfish. I know we should have been grateful for the life we were being given. But fuck that, it just wasn’t sit right after everything.

In shock, we insist on a test. A painful one where they stick a large needle into Jenevieve's uterus. We wait a couple weeks and get the results. It’s confirmed, Ronin has Down syndrome. It doesn’t matter though, by week 14 or 15 we still end up losing him. We miscarry. I’d like to say we were in disbelief but we weren’t. We took in the news practically and moved forward logically, or at least that’s what we told ourselves. By this point we felt like we were experts in pain. But we weren’t, we just learned how to shut down and bury it for a time.

Over the next year we fall apart again. Our relationship seems to be nearing its end. We blow up on each other week by week like it’s a bad habit we can’t shake, like it’s needed to keep the relationship alive in some way. I was angry at the world every day, hiding in deafening depression. Jenevieve was, too. We hated everyone and everything. It was hard for us to relate to people, to friends and family. We didn’t know who we were anymore or who we were supposed to be, our identities were lost in the ashes of our babies.

We still held on because of love.

By the next winter, we got pregnant for the eighth and final time. It was entirely unexpected. We weren’t trying at all. But it happened anyway. It seemed foolish at that point to put ourselves through this again. Why didn't we do in vitro? Why didn't we adopt? The first was too expensive for us to consider at the time and I didn't step up with a financing solution, and the second, well, I wanted a child of my own. But with so much unresolved pain between us, was it even right to bring an adopted child into our lives anyway, let alone our own flesh and blood?

The morning Jenevieve came to me and told me she was pregnant this last time, she seemed reticent but hopeful. All I could think to say in that moment was, “I’m sorry for doing this to you...I should have pulled out.” I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings by saying this. I never would have dreamed of saying something so callous in the beginnings of our relationship so why did I say it then?

In my mindset, I truly felt I fucked up. I truly felt I did something awful to her. I truly felt like it was a factual statement I just needed to say out loud. I didn’t want to put her through anymore physical or emotional pain. The news of her being pregnant didn’t feel like a gift, especially after seven miscarriages. It felt like a cruel joke. I apologized.

Reluctant at first, we finally became hopeful again. Especially since every check up rang normal and the little one was progressing like a champ, getting bigger right alongside Jenevieve every day. Then Jenevieve woke up one morning, dizzy and falling over. An hour later, we were at the hospital about to settle in for two days of hard living, no sleep, and pretending to the world that we were okay. But it only seemed like we were okay because the shock of it all had steeled our nerves.

We named him West. He made it to 16 weeks. Ten fingers. Ten toes. A steady heartbeat right up until his death. The doctor told us that it was a freak accident, that it shouldn’t have happened this way given that he was a perfectly healthy, normal, growing boy. His umbilical cord got twisted, cutting off his blood supply. He died.

Jenevieve was too far along to pass him at home. The doctors insisted we stay at the hospital overnight to miscarry. And so we did.

She gave birth to West in the early hours on a cold January morning. He was so perfect and so fragile. And Jenevieve was so damn brave throughout, glowing and bright as she faced this immeasurable pain. Halos around her the whole way.

It was as if she ran into battle no questions asked. I held her hand and stood in awe at her side. She went through all the pregnancy pains, contractions, dilation, and ultimately, gave birth to our last child, West. We held him for such a long time. We knew that was the only time we would ever get. He was such a good boy. I wish we could have gotten to know him better.

Ever since that fateful morning Jenevieve and I have been together but separate. We held each other tight for a long time, crying at kitchen sinks and staring at ceilings. But after West, we’ve just been disintegrating. Our future doesn’t only lie in having a child, no, but our ship has been almost irreparably destroyed because of the back to back storms we've weathered. It's hard to repair a ship when you're still out at sea.

Any marriage has its trials. There are tough times. There’s blame and anger and accountability on both sides. And some marriages make it through. Some fold under the pressure. Ours is facing the latter because we can only take so many punches from each other until we're just hitting dust.

Years of fights and drawing lines in the sand sapped away our consciousness. And I didn’t put up a good enough fight against my ego. All my worst fear-based thoughts crept in and in turn fed fear-based emotions and pretty soon I was having a relationship with a projection of Jenevieve, an extension of my pain, not the real Jenevieve. I'm sure she would agree on her part.

All the magic we harnessed in the beginning, the magic we held onto throughout, the ticking clock, the open door, the two little blonde-headed girls, the memories as a family together, a puppy, another puppy, businesses built, a home made, it all flashed by in an instant now that I look back.

And so much of me wants to return to certain defining moments (now that I know which ones they are) and stand up and be a better man. I can’t and that hurts. But that’s the weight of life. And now we find ourselves throwing our hands up in surrender to the present.

Jenevieve and I went through mediation a couple months back and came to an amicable agreement. So amicable, in fact, that the mediator told us that she’s never experienced the love and kindness that we treated each other with in any of her mediations through the years. Her telling us that brought peace to our war-torn hearts. We left in separate cars that day, eyes welling up with tears as we let go of each other’s hand, driving out separate exits.

A month later as plans are being made for me to move out, the COVID-19 pandemic hits, then a 5.7-magnitude earthquake soon after, the biggest to hit Utah since 1992. With so much inflammation and unconsciousness going around, we're at a boiling point.

If we let the ego drive for too long, armed with only our fears of the future and our desires to live in the past, then our world will get heated, inflamed, same with our families, same with us as individuals. Great changes are needed in times like this. Doors need to open and remain open. And clocks need to tick forward, not as a pressing reminder of the impending future, but as a present acceptance of our power to act for prosperity now.

All of it seems so heavy for us to bear, to go through a painful divorce and the world crumbling at the same time. But if Jenevieve and I separate ourselves enough from the emotions and thoughts of this being ugly and unfair, then we’re able to see the gift that it is.

The ability to clear our minds from the tethers of our self-limiting past, to not look back in anger, to not feel the loss of a specific future together, but to live presently, knowing that we can do anything and overcome anything with nothing but a blank page and our wits. Because we're more than just characters in a story. We're the authors of our story.

Jenevieve taught me all that. Our life that we chose together taught me all that. Without her strength, her ability to pick herself up after so much loss, over and over again, we wouldn’t have learned to love like we do. We wouldn’t have had a home at all. We wouldn't have been able to wash off the self-pity.

Now we’re raw again. We’re vulnerable again. We’re awake again. We’re letting go of fate. We’re out of our shadows, facing our fears, resurfacing to an open path that leads right to our present.

Jenevieve lost baby after baby, suffering the emotional, spiritual, mental and physical pain that she did. Then she fought for our marriage, built a thriving business, created a loving home, and is beautifully raising her daughter with all the right life lessons being learned. She is an inspiration.

We fell so far from grace together. We held each other the whole way down. We tripped and stumbled, and were human. We became angry and unconscious, falling into old patterns that never served us. We tried to control too much and accept too little. We wanted to be each other’s everything, but we couldn't be, because that's not healthy anyway.

Now we’re coming back out the other side, purging past selves, vomiting on fertile soil, ripping open dimensions, pushing stars around, loving every last molecule between us, taking care of our hardest of hearts, softening them up so we can gain the courage to hold each other’s hands and walk out that door together, into the great unknown, and go down our separate paths once again. The clock is ticking. The door is open. Now we must go.