Memory, Grief and Lost Love.

Though not a physical death, divorce is another loss many of us will experience. Like death, divorce can be preceded or followed by mourning for a myriad of reasons that are as unique to us as the relationship we were involved in. Below, I share a portion of the story of my own divorce and what it taught me about honoring my past and making peace with the memory of the love I lost.

One of the many things no one told me about divorce is how, for a period, you can lose the ability to access your memories because you can no longer allow yourself to seek comfort from them. The end of your relationship not only destabilizes your present, and makes your future painfully uncertain, it also steals your past.

Not that I lost my memory – though I know firsthand how brain fog and forgetfulness are a result of the stress and overwhelm caused by the death of any primary relationship. I am talking about how memories of the connection to my partner that brought me comfort - the ones I could retreat to in the tough times - were suddenly off limits. I could retrieve them of course, but to do so resulted in a wave of melancholy, grief, and lament for all of those 'wasted' years. I could not help but look on the years building my relationship as anything but wasted because in the end, there was nothing to show for the work.

With time, distance, and therapy I have since changed my perspective on time shared with my ex. In the heat of divorce though, allowing myself to reminisce repeatedly set back whatever progress toward healing I managed to make. Indulging even the slightest remembrance of a song we danced to or acknowledging the familiar whiff if his cologne on a stranger walking by could derail whatever semblance of a good mood I started out with that day.

I compare it to deleting a file from a directory but forgetting to delete the desktop short cut as well. In a moment of carelessness, you click on the familiar short cut icon, because 'pre delete' this would bring you the information you wanted. But now, you click and get an error that says the file cannot open because it no longer exists. Boom. You can't access the past because the life that was there has ended - it too no longer exists.

 At the time, it felt like whatever love, hope, or faith my memories represented died or were damaged beyond repair, and I had nothing left to anchor me to anything.

My warm and reassuring past became haunted by ghosts that could not accompany me as I moved forward into the freefall of a new reality without the person I continued to love but could not be with.

That's what I mean by feeling like your memories are lost to you. Looking back hurts too much and looking forward is necessary, but uncomfortable. In my case, this created a period of too many years where I lived in a constrained limbo, laser focused only on the present and on survival, bereft of the comfort of the past or hope for the future. I now accept that blame for the end of our marriage lay equally at both of our feet, but at the time I saw my ex clearly as the villian. As such, I expected to feel angry at him for all the things I perceived he did to rob me of my future. I did not expect to feel equally, if not more heart broken about what our divorce was doing to also annihilate my past.

My inability to look or feel backward prolonged my recovery and put me and my support team in an awkward position for a long time. At family dinners meant to cheer me up we couldn't talk about any of the 'good old days' unless they pre-dated my ex. For a while there I couldn't even bear to say or hear his name. There was less laughter for everyone around me during those years because I couldn't cut my ex out of my memory the way I could cut him out of old vacation photos.

I wish I could tell you how it happened, but eventually, organically there came a time when memories would rise and instead of bracing for the expected hit to my heart, I would find myself relaxing, smiling, even willing to hold the image a moment longer. Though still ghosts of a lifetime past, they didn't haunt me as badly, and the people and the pictures started to take on more color and depth again. The echoes of laughter returned and sounded full, alive, and healing. My ex was still there, but he faded into the background, while the images of those friends and family who were important stepped forward. And talking about them, reminiscing on those times, felt good and safe.

After a too long hiatus, I became someone with a past again, someone who was known and remembered as well.

A lesson from all of this is that in denying myself access to the past to avoid my ex, I was also denying my own right to exist, and to be the most important character in my own story. I avoided thinking about the good times with my friends and family because one person's role had changed. That's too much power to give anyone in the book we are constantly writing about our lives.

I understand why I did it. And I don't know if I would do anything differently faced with the same situation again. Afterall, it was a coping mechanism and our desire for survival can often override our best wisdom and intentions. I would like to think that next time, in the face of any loss, I will be able to cherish and hold on to everything about the person and the experiences we shared regardless of how long or how well we loved.