Surviving

I awoke with a sense that I’d forgotten something, and then I opened my eyes to see the vacant side of our bed. I padded down the stairs into the kitchen to an empty coffee pot. Sighing, I dumped the old grounds into the compost. It was a Saturday morning, and my house was silent.  It was a strange emptiness, and I felt the house missed the usual noise. Dropping the old coffee filter, I noticed that I needed to take out the compost, and as I scuttled across the snow-covered yard to our green bin, I felt my neck hair prickle. A rat lived under the shed that housed our green bin, and I’m ashamed to admit that other than leaving out poison, my courage has failed me in further rat extermination efforts. To my great relief, I spotted nothing. Entering back into the warmth of my safe, rat-free home, I felt like a kid when getting back into bed after going to the bathroom at night. Tears pricked my eyes, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the cold or remembering that rogue rodents had always been under the “husband” department. I pushed the thought away and opened up the cupboard above the stove. This cupboard stored my pharmaceuticals, one pill to keep me from spiralling into endless dread and the other to keep the hours I cried down to only one hour a day. It’s almost been a year since he’s been gone. If I was being honest, I thought I would be doing better. However, looking back, I realize I’m better than I was. I can see myself now, the day after everything fell apart. 

A year ago I looked down at the time as I pulled up to the church. I only had thirty minutes before he’d return home. Pulling open the church doors with an improper amount of energy I forced myself to slow down as I entered the solemn and shadowy church. I awkwardly scurried down the aisle where women in dresses with doilies adorning their heads and kneeling men with suits on kept heads bowed. The stillness of the church, pews dotted with people silently mouthing words and candles lit around the altar, felt alien. To the left of the altar was a booth with a red curtain across it.  Above the curtain was a round light, with red and green lights demonstrating occupied or vacant. I looked down at the woman next in line and asked in an unmodulated whisper, “Can I go ahead of you? It’s an emergency.” I cannot remember her face; I only recall my relief when she silently nodded. I’m sure I looked like a disaster after the worst night of my life. I briefly wondered if she thought I might have murdered someone or some other heinous crime that merited such an abrupt break in protocol.

The thought left as quickly as it came when a man exited the dark confessional booth. With my head down, I hurriedly pulled aside the red velvet curtain and knelt for the first time in confession. It was constrictingly small. It was so tiny that my green Converse’s stuck outside the red curtain when kneeling. A small sconce on the way illuminated the little room. I looked left through the lattice, where I saw Father P****** sitting. My mind raced, my mouth went dry. What was I supposed to say? Then the lines I’d seen in movies came to me in a rush, “Forgive me, Father,  for I have sinned, it has been…well, I’ve never been to confessional.” “It’s me, Jennifer.  P*****’s wife, I need your help.”

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I confessed my husband's sins against me. Some moments are clear, such as how calmly I knelt there on the red cushioned kneeler, rifling off the facts of the case—a Presbyterian confessing someone else’s sins to a Catholic priest. My hands were shaking, but the rest of my body was numb. It reminded me of the time in high school when Betty had dared me to drink 9 Red Bulls in a row—wide alert but also maybe on the verge of collapse. I also remember walking down the church steps, staring at my green Converse shoes as I returned to the car as if they were walking themselves. Unfortunately, the result of my “confession” didn’t solve my problem. The priest could not meet with us on such short notice, and after last night's brief conversation, I feared confronting my husband alone.

A stroke is caused when the brain doesn’t get the blood it needs. For most stroke patients, they never get back that part of the brain that lacked the blood. Where a million neurons used to light it up, it’s now just a black graveyard on the MRI. In recovery, the brain, like many corporations, never refills the position and just divides the work to the working areas of the brain, building more and more synapses to compensate for those lost. The betrayal of infidelity is like a stroke. One moment, you're getting the kids ready for bed, and the next, you're slumping back against the dishwasher after hearing, “I’m with another woman.” I can’t remember how, but I managed to go downstairs without screaming or crying as my kids watched Kung Fu Panda in the living room. Innocently unaware that their worst fears and sense of stability would soon be upended. Dissociating while staring at my bedroom rug, bracing my body on all fours, fingernails gripping the carpet pile, I tried to breathe, think, and comprehend. What do you do when you face such casual cruelty from a person you love so deeply? I lay on my side, slowly extending my arms into the empty air. My prayer was my mute agony. After nineteen years of scaffolding, the story of us has come crashing down. I’m in free fall as the future evaporates into a black abyss, and the past becomes a myth because what part of it was the truth?

Human cruelty and malevolence are horrifying realities of the human condition. I still struggle to comprehend how the person who vowed before God and all our friends and family to love and be faithful to me could eventually care so little. I struggle to know how I will juggle the demands of mothering my kids as a single parent while financially providing for them. I struggle to understand the past in light of what I now know. I struggle internally not to hate my husband and not to become cruel myself. There’s a line in The Hiding Place, which is a book that chronicles the life of a Dutch Christian who helped smuggle and hide Jews during the occupation of the Netherlands in WW2. At one point in the story, she wrestles with the terrifying viciousness of the Nazies, and her aging Father tells her, “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still…” So wherever we confront evil, whether, in the cruelty of soldiers, our hearts or in those closest to us, my glimmer of hope is this: there is no place where you can fall where God’s love won’t catch you.