A DAY LATER, A HEART SHORT...

Yesterday was the day from hell.

It started out well enough: double appointments with my therapist and my psychiatrist [the well-loved Dr. Feelgood, willing to try whatever works]. Dr. F actually gave me a bit of a pep talk, saying that he thought I was doing remarkably well under the circumstances, which lifted me up.

A bit.

But I spent the rest of the day in the Slough of Despond anyway. There was something about repeating to my therapist what I had said to my good friend the day before that made it seem inescapable: I was unable to commit to living without a relationship with a man. Could I wake up tomorrow and feel I had the strength and the will and the persuasion that making that commitment was the right thing to do? I suppose anything is possible, but it seems a dim likelihood from here.

And here is where I spent most of yesterday.

Here is where my marriage seems to have finally come to an end. Where I have to look at the distinct possibility of losing house, home, family, and community, and for what? For an empty room with no one in it but myself and my regrets. As I said then, "Swell." The worst of it is not the knowledge of what would await me, but the knowledge that the path to my "freedom", if that is what it is, would lie through the shards of my wife's broken heart. She has made it clear enough that even my confusion is causing it to break; a formal decision that lay beyond her capacity to endure would finish the job. And that makes the sense of inevitability which was the spirit of yesterday so terribly hard to bear.

My good friend told me that leaving my marriage would be just "walking away," taking the easy way out; I could only say that I could hardly imagine a harder way, "out" or in any other direction, than leaving my marriage and everything the last twenty-six years have meant to me. And I still can't; in fact, the higher the price the more it seems like the more honest and honorable thing to do. It just doesn't make it any easier to do.

Dr. Feelgood for his part said that I needed to see that there was light at the end of the tunnel. I could only reply that what I could see at what looked like the end of the tunnel didn't look much like light to me. And it still doesn't.

Stay with me.
And pray for all of us, if you do "that thing".
I'm not very good at it, myself.