the grief we don't talk about:

death is easier than rejection

I met Georgia Clare in a Sarah Fay workshop here on “the stack”. We exchanged “notes” on the grief that not many talk about when they have experienced a non-death loss. My essay on my own divorce appeared on her “stack” and here is Georgia’s guest post.

Giving name to the grief she felt offered a new way to process — thanks to Dr. Pauline Boss. She is the principal theorist of the concept of ambiguous loss. Her study of this phenomenon describes a loss that remains unclear and has no resolution. Her revolutionary research and the term she coined in the 70s, offers permission to many who experience the lower case (d)eath of a future they imagine— and the countless secondary losses that come along with the dissolution of a marriage. It leads to feelings of confusion, anxiety and in many cases, chronic sorrow. For some, naming this loss, grief inducing, feels like “permission granted”.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

When I thought about grief, I always connected it to the loss of a loved one in death. But what about grieving people who are still alive? Grieving the loss of the life you had one minute and didn’t the next? Grieving the loss of yourself? I didn’t even imagine that was a thing, but sadly it is. I know firsthand all about it.

I’m talking about the grief of separation and divorce which sadly is something I have experienced very recently.

If you read some of my previous posts or the book I’m serialising here you can learn more about my story. 

The short version: I had been married for 32 1/2 years when in the autumn of 2022 my husband and I decided on a trial separation. Our marriage had been rather wonderful for most of those years, in just the last couple things had started to decline.

Two weeks after I came back to our house in France, leaving him in Thailand, I found out he was having an affair. 

To say it rocked my world is a vast understatement. It obliterated it. We had been together since we were 19, friends since 15 and we were now 53. I didn’t have even a glimmer of an idea of how to do life without him.

My days had gone from sunny to not just grey, but black.

I didn’t think of it as grief or that I was grieving until my sister said it one day. Then all of a sudden, I realised yes, I am grieving. I’m grieving so many different things.

·       The loss of my best friend

·       The loss of the person who always had my back

·       The loss of someone I hugged every day

·       The loss of the person who took care of car and house maintenance

·       The loss of the person who brought me a cup of tea, made exactly how I like it, every morning without fail

·       The loss of the person who I talked to deeply about so many things

·       The loss of the person who knew me better than anyone else

·       The loss of myself, because if I wasn’t with him, who was I?

·       The loss of all the plans we had for the future

·       The loss of my perfect little family of four

·       The loss of the person who cared for me when I was sick

·       The loss of the person who did all the driving

·       The loss of the one person who I trusted 

I lost my travel partner, business partner, laughing partner, going on picnics partner. I lost everything that was my world. Of course, a few of these losses didn’t happen overnight, but now there was no fixing anything. It was broken beyond repair.

This happened at the very beginning of November and at the start of the new year, a friend of mine lost her husband suddenly to cancer. They thought they’d have longer, but he had a brain haemorrhage and dropped dead right in front of her and died in her arms.

My first thought was lucky you. Then my next thought was OMG how can I even think that?  But that thought didn’t go away. It stuck in my head. It went round and round until I really had to examine it.

I was sad, devastated, hurt, in pain, the same way I would be if he had died. I missed him terribly in every way. Just as if he had died. The Us was gone, no more N*** and Georgia. The difference was that on top of that, I had a broken heart. All the memories of our years together were now tainted with questions. 

There were now sad and painful memories of hateful things we said to each other to add to all the happy memories. He was ignoring me, my emails and my texts. He wouldn’t video chat so we could discuss things. He was ghosting me! His wife of over 30 years!

It would have been so much easier if he had just died. I’d still be devastated and sad, but I’d only have happy memories. Now, I realise that this would not have been easier for my daughters. He wasn’t a bad father, just a shitty husband, and I would never wish for anything that would bring them more pain. 

You see we really had a very good relationship up to the point of his mid-life crisis, which involved a lot of alcohol, cannabis and, being in Thailand, pretty much anything you wanted from the pharmacy. His choice was Valium or Xanax, with whiskey of course. It also involved being at the bar most nights with his friends playing pool or just hanging out. Up until then, we hardly ever argued, we were each other’s best friends, we travelled together and ran businesses together, did most things together, and had lots of exciting plans for the future.

We were the couple who always had it together, the envy of everyone else, the only ones I knew who were still in love with each other after such a long marriage and our marriage had always been so much happier than most of our friends. Along with our two beautiful daughters, we were the perfect family. We had a life full of adventure, living all over the world. After years of hustle, we were finally making it financially and had just bought a second home.

So when it all came crashing down, a tsunami of grief hit me. I’ve been sad before and in pain. I’ve lost my parents, my father, not a great loss (bad man) and my mother actually still alive, but dead to me, that’s a whole other story! But this. Nothing had brought me to my knees like this. To know there is someone out there who was everything to you and who now chooses to live life without you is very hard to accept.

In the first few weeks, my whole body ached. Like I would imagine you’d feel if you had been beaten up. I hardly ate anything. The few bits of food I managed to force down my throat felt like swallowing bricks. I didn’t sleep. And I cried, oh how I cried. Crying like I’ve never experienced before. It was as if my soul itself was in pain. 

So yes, for me death would have been so much easier to deal with than rejection. I have to live the rest of my life knowing that for a long time, I had been lied to, that he did nothing after I found out to try and save our marriage, that he never fought for me, that one day he just decided he didn’t want me anymore.

If he’d died, I’d only remember the good times. There were a lot of them.

I’m still grieving and not many ‘get’ it, not many understand. The day my divorce was final it just happened to be a Friday, and on most Fridays, I meet up with friends at a local bar in my village or the next one and we sit and chat. 

I told them that I’d got the paperwork through from the lawyers that morning to say it was all final and most of them said congratulations, like I’d won a prize or accomplished something. They kept saying I should celebrate, and I said, “I’ve never felt less like celebrating”. 

I’d made a mistake in getting a lift with my friends or I would have left. I just wanted to curl up in bed and cry. A song came on, I can’t remember what it was now, but it was one of our favourites and I started crying. One friend held me and whispered in my ear, “I know, I know, I’m so so sorry this happened to you. I’m so sorry.” That’s all I needed, to feel understood. I love all my friends, but that night, just one of them understood. But it helped, it was enough.

Grief has changed me. It’s made me care for myself more, my mental, emotional, spiritual and physical well-being. I prioritise them all now. It’s made me feel invincible in that I’ve survived what I thought would be impossible so I can do anything now. Nothing can touch me. This has been good and bad. I sometimes have a ‘whatever, I don’t care’ attitude to things that I should be more careful about like boundaries when dating.

But one of the more surprising things is that I don’t really worry about anything anymore. I don’t worry about finances, even though for the first time in my adult life I have no backup. I don’t worry about anything. I just accept. Because nothing can be as bad as losing him and nothing will ever feel as bad as my heart breaking.

My purpose in writing this is twofold. First, if you are in a situation like mine, I want you to know you are not alone. There’s a reason why if you google the biggest stresses in life divorce is number 2, with the death of a loved one being number 1.

Secondly, if you are a friend of someone going through this or know someone who is, please be kind and understand that you don’t just ‘move on’ and ‘get over it’. You don’t just ‘find another man’. You wouldn’t say that to someone whose spouse had died, would you?! Understand that they are grieving, even though they may seem like they have their life together after a year or two, believe me, the grief still hits, and some days it hits harder than others.

When Barri and I were talking about guest posting on each other’s publications she sent me the definition of ambiguous grief which was a term I hadn’t heard before, but it explained very well how I felt. It’s a wonderful comfort to know there’s an actual term for the feelings you have. That they’re not just in your head, and it’s not just you feeling them.

“Ambiguous loss is a person’s profound sense of loss and sadness that is not associated with the death of a loved one. It can be a loss of emotional connection when a person’s physical presence remains, or when that emotional connection remains but a physical connection is lost. Often, there isn’t a sense of closure.” - Mayo Clinic Health System

I would also like to add a disclaimer here. I’m not talking about or have any experience of the end of an abusive marriage. I’m sure in that case the feelings would be very different. This is just my experience and how I feel as a nonprofessional about the end of what was a long and mostly beautiful marriage.