Sadness and Loss

Sadness is inevitable. The sadness I feel is deep and profound and ever present. I wear it like an invisible vest. It hugs me around my heart and some days I can hardly breathe. Some days it makes it hard to think straight. Most days it’s clothed in a cloak of humour and practicality, and it doesn’t express itself but I know it’s there….. always. I wear it in my eyes, just a slightly different shade of light. Subtle, but I know it because I recognise it in others. It’s hard to write about this, it’s hard to describe it. It’s hard to own it because always and everywhere there is someone with more right to sadness than you. I work with people who deal with devastating medical diagnosis and illnesses every day. In their company my right to sadness is questionable.

Sadness brings with it many emotions that come and go. It brings with it grief and loneliness, and anger. I can cope with the former, I battle with the latter. I am grieving. And I am angry. I am grieving the loss of a person I thought I was in love with, and the life I thought I had. In counselling there is a well respected model for grief by Elizabeth Kubler Ross. They call it the 5 stages of grief and loss ;1. denial, 2. anger, 3. Bargaining, 4. depression and 5. acceptance. The assumption is we work through them over time and come out the other side if we are lucky. I feel I am on a cycle of grief, this is a good description for me, it’s like a wheel of the 5 stages that go round and round. When you are spinning particularly fast some of the emotions clash together and the wheel spits you out on the ground trembling and unsure how to get back up. Or you get caught in the spokes, unsure how to move from one to the other, waiting for something to define that movement. Life isn’t so simple, and it can be hard to hear.

I have not lost my husband, he is not dead, he has not left me, I am not alone. But he did leave me. The man I knew left me suddenly and abruptly. The relationship I had flew out the window with 1 conversation. ‘those pants are mine, I like to do this sometimes, I like to wear womens’ clothes. But I’ll stop now’. That was November 2014. It has taken him 3 years to acknowledge that he is not the person I thought he was. It has taken this long because of course he is exactly the person he knows himself to be. He is the only one who has ever truly known himself, until he trusted me enough to share his secret with me. In recent reflection I think my closest analogy is that of a Levirate marriage; a type of marriage in which the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his brother's widow, and the widow is obliged to marry her deceased husband's brother. They are similar but they are not the same. Krisitin Collier likens the transition to now being married to your husbands’ sister. In whichever way you start to transition in your relationship the loss must be acknowledged and understood to be accepted

I lost the sense of the person I had fallen in love with, I lost the comfortable physical space I shared, I lost the sense of myself in my relationship. Our emotional connection deepened but the physical space did not. This imbalance widened as it became clear that I had become totally emotionally available to him , however, as my counsellor defined some time later; he cannot be emotionally available to you when he has never been emotionally available to himself’.

And in all of this sadness I discovered some good things. I discovered that I love my husband enough to see beyond my need for the old relationship. I love him enough to see him through this journey that he is on. I love him enough to know that we must be on this journey with him, otherwise the isolation of being alone will drown him, and he will never grow to be whoever it is he was meant to be. I am strong, and I am patient. And I know that for all the people on this journey with me, that your spouse or partner did love you once, enough to trust their lives to you in marriage. In a support group I attended briefly I was struck by the anger of all to the person who had come out, and as I listened I realised that much of this anger comes from disbelief that the person who married them had ever loved them. But that simply can’t be true. The love was strong enough to be good as it was, but maybe not strong enough to endure what it had to become. It doesn’t mean that love wasn’t there. It is a different kind of love.

Every long term relationship has it’s defining moments, moments when the journey of knowing someone is transformed. The author Ann Enright has been quoted as saying ‘in a long term relationship you never kiss the same person twice’. An undeniable truth in all of this is that many people face challenges in their marriages. Many people are facing relationship metamorphosis or destruction due to a deeper understanding of the person they have married. It is not easy to be married. That is a truth. And this is where you are not alone.