The Great Sadness

I started thinking to myself that I should create a name for each year of my life... 2016 would be The Year of Barbed Wire. Because every time I moved or shifted positions I felt the cuts of my pain deep in my skin. The burden of my sorrow was a great weight that encased me. I didn’t think I would come out of that year alive because the enormity of my sadness created physical pain. Enough so that I thought I couldn’t possibly live on. How does someone feel the depth and extent of what I did and not collapse? How was I able to keep breathing?

2017 was The Blossoming. I took the year to appreciate every single blessing no matter how small. I created a cocoon of self love and care. I started to get back to the person I had known before the barbed wire. I floated through a period of utter and total gratitude...

And then came The Great Sadness. You know the movie The Neverending Story? The Nothing? It’s a faceless darkness that slowly takes over the land and strips it of all of its beauty and goodness and virtue. The Great Sadness and the Nothing were the same. Suddenly in March I was thrown into this dark place of witnessing my husband’s ultimate demise. He was going to go down a deep detrimental spiral and take down everyone and everything around him with a fierce determination to ruin all that held beauty. The Great Sadness rolled in like a quiet ground fog in a black forest. Suddenly I couldn’t see my feet to move forward and I lost all momentum.

We did have patches of sunlight that filtered down through the trees occasionally. But mostly, the darkness became the norm.

Unlike the barbed wire which was acute moments of pain that cut swiftly- the Great Sadness has been a pulsing ink that has attached itself to my body. I could feel this sliminess of his pain that dripped off of my body. Imagine being dunked in a giant inkwell. That is the Great Sadness.

I prayed to God at the start of 2018. When my husband came to me and said he was unhappy- and that a lot of it was our relationship- and a lot of it was my character defects. I asked Him (God) to please be careful with me. I pleaded. I told him I had had enough pain that I already knew the strength I could hold inside of me like a beacon.

And then my son had an incident at school that hit too close to home. And I was left reeling with my emotions of my past trauma while simultaneously dealing with a person that was supposed to be my husband but somehow morphed into someone I no longer recognized.

Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. I haven’t known in the past 9 months who is going to present himself or what situations I would walk into upon arriving home. I have been tormented by false hope, and slight glimmers of the real man I married. I have known the suffering of constant rejection, and destruction that someone else will cause in order to justify their own anger, actions, and failed expectations. Just when I thought I’ve hurt all the hurts to fill a lifetime capacity- another hurtful thing would be thrown my way.

I keep asking God why. Yes- something is better on the other side. But why have I been alongside someone whose sole mission has been to destroy all the beauty when I had finally found that awakening within myself? From barbed wire to endless gratitude to the Great Sadness?

I’m angry with him that my life for 9 months has been questions, chaos, unknowns, unrest, anxiety, stomach aches, sleepless nights, fear, panic, pain, and the Nothing. I have begged and pleaded for my lost best friend to have a divine intervention to find his way home. Home to himself and me. Because I’m the only home he’s ever truly known. He’s losing his house, his only family that has truly cared, his loving and loyal wife, and his best friend. He has never dared to let anyone in as he has let me.

My life is the great big unknown. Will I get to stay in my house? Will he ever know the pain he caused me, or feel remorse? What lasting repercussions will all of this have on our kids? How do I stay well enough for me to take care of my children?

I am tired of schlepping my stuff in between an apartment and home. To living a life of constant heartache and stomachaches. To hanging on to a tiny sliver of a golden thread of hope that he’ll wake up. To not know where I’ll end up is terrifying.

I guess it’s exciting, too. Maybe 2019 should be called the The Precipice (and instead of falling I will fly). Or The Dawning. Or The Awakening.