Good Bye

We've had a long and intense winter. "Stay warm," "be careful," "travel safely," and other references to us and how we deal with these conditions have become as normal as have the usual "take care," "be well," and "so long."

I have always loved winter.  Both the descriptions of it in stories and the accounts of others as well as its reality (including treacherous driving conditions, snow shoveling, painfully cold hands and feet). So, perhaps what I'm about to write down here will not be shared by many, because to them winter is but a nuisance, another season and its temperaments with whom they have to deal.

I have to say very clearly: It will be hard to say good-bye to winter this year.  Frankly, I feel compelled to bid it farewell with words quite similar to the ones we have used to support each other during it: "good-bye, winter, be careful out there among them higher temps; travel safely to places where you're expected and where you can be yourself; stay cold. Take good care of yourself, be well and, most importantly, do come back, may you return safely and with all your powers intact. So, my good bye to winter involves my hope for future "hello."

But:

Yes, I do feel somewhat wistful these days.  My 2013 has seen many good-byes. The biggest of them the good-bye to a 20 year marriage. Two decades that contained many happy moments. And yet, the whole of it was larger and different than the sum of those moments. One mistake I had made (and I'm not sure, if I couldn't be susceptible to making it again) was that I kept summing up those happy times and ignoring at the same time the overall, the whole, of the relationship. There were plenty of happy moments over the course of those years. Many of them captured in pictures, journal entries and shared stories. But when I allowed myself to look at the whole of it, those moments, and not even their sum, could erase the feeling that something was missing. Something so essential that it almost seems to escape articulation. My wife and I both "knew" this, I believe. And there are plenty of examples of how we, each in our own way, sought solace and comfort in other places.  Could we not have the courage to say it, to point it out? Or would one person's courage always have entailed the other person's fear and resentment and, most of all, clinging?

A very dear friend of mine recently told me what led up to the break-up with his partner.
The more I thought about it, he said, the more I realized that we could not love each other in the way we really needed to be loved.

What a simple statement! And how profound at the same time. It takes plenty of courage and discipline to come to such a conclusion (my friend has both). I have not had it and allowed for things to get messier over the years.  From what I can currently see and understand the reasons for this lack of courage are not simply rooted in cowardice (although some of that may also be part of the mix). Rather the lack of courage seems be due to a kind of tenacity that's made up equal parts of grandiosity, duty and responsibility. Perhaps it is because "duty" and "responsibility" are such acceptable traits that I never quite came to realize how much they were in the service of my grandiosity.

So what was that "missing piece" that made the whole of our relationship less than the sum of its moments? Overall, I would say that it was a chronic inability (and perhaps often also an unwillingness) to really "hold" the other person, to have the other's back.  Responsibility becomes either over--or under-responsiveness. Hardly ever found its precious middle. Physical and visceral safety with each other became an increasingly rare item.  I often think and talk about the Buzz Lightyear phrase: "I am Buzz Lightyear, and I come in peace." This assurance of peace--instead of resentment--a sense of saying and knowing "you're safe with me, even when I'm mad at you" is what was missing.  We may even have said something to that effect. But our actions proved that we didn't mean it--that we didn't know how to mean it!

In the process of these 20 years we disappointed each other in ways that were irreparable. Not for lack of trying, but because of the lack of an almost instinctively necessary sense of safety with each other. I'm hopefully not sounding too abstract when I say this: A dis-appointment is the removal of an appointment. We were, perhaps, not appointed to do for each other what we set out to do.  Perhaps this dis-appointment will repeat itself until I realize that only I myself am appointed to provide such safety to myself. And (another "perhaps") perhaps only then can I feel truly safe and convinced of the other person's peaceful intentions with me.

Like this winter my marriage had evolved into a state of perma-frost with occasional thaws. Those thaws could be either moments of closeness or moments of intense conflict.  Perhaps my decision to move on from this relationship is not so dissimilar from other people's decision to move away from the cold and settle in Florida or, even better, Arizona. The yearning for a warmer more hospitable climate seems to persuade many folks to leave their homes of twenty years and more in search for an easier less winterized life. And yet they mourn their former homes, friends, lives. Leaving is hard. And so it is with this marriage.  It is hard to leave it behind. There were many good things in it. Yet, no longer enough to keep growing. The temperatures simply never rose enough anymore to make that possible.

More than anything I hope that my former wife of twenty years will find her Arizona. I hope she will find it with all her powers intact. And I hope she, too, will begin to grow again in a climate of ease and warmth.