This is my last Monday in my wife’s house, the beginning of my last week here. I’m in the final stages of packing and staging my boxes and furniture in preparation for loading the moving/storage Pod on Thursday and Friday. The reality of the move is evident throughout the house. It hangs heavily in my heart.

Our carefully practiced normalcy is more like a free fall. One might mistake my packing up as for a long business trip, not for an eviction.

My wife and I spent the day almost—almost—as any other non-marriage dissolving day. She went about her day and I mine, coming together for morning coffee, preparing and eating dinner together, discussing the South End by-laws revisions as we might have last year this time, before the end was decreed. Is this the way the week will progress?

The poignant moments come when I look at our little dog Bebe. He’s the innocent among us. He doesn’t know that this time next week there will be no man in the house. Niland will be gone, never to return.

I know that my wife is simply biding her time. She would have preferred for me to have been gone long before now. I know this and sense it daily.

My schedule was agreed to in exchange for not contesting the divorce.

In truth, it has been too long living under this dark cloud of unhappiness—for both of us. The tension is barely below the surface. It’s a wonder we’ve survived.

It’s hard right now to know how I feel. I’m sad and anxious and excited all at the same time. I still regret this is happening. I still believe it was a moral failure for my wife not to give our marriage a chance of renewal.

I want the week to be over.

I want to move on.

My wife says it’s not safe for her to talk to me. What she means is that I might, probably will, write about our conversation. I’m doing so now. The narratives apparently frighten her because they illustrate a side of her character she would prefer remain private. I get it. Plus, she says I have misquoted her and/or taken her words out of context. Not so. If she said anything kind to me, I would record that. That she only judges and feigns misunderstanding the simplest things—like being surprised tonight that I might need the cars out of the garage in order to pack up the moving and storage Pod—is all on her turf, not mine. This is her turf, and I know she wants me gone, despite not making the leaving particularly easy. It seems that she would prefer I pack up all my earthly belongings, in her not large flat, without taking up any space she might otherwise need. Heaven help me if I impinge on yoga space (for three days…)

We are both counting days, maybe hours.

I’m writing because I need to write about what’s happening now. It’s my therapy, and cheaper than my long departed but much loved therapist Dr. Ralph. My wife thought he was a waste of money, that we only had intellectual conversations. I guess she meant she didn’t see the improvements in my behavior, unexpressed, that she hoped to see. I don’t know. She wasn’t there so how would she know what went on? Perhaps it was professional competitiveness.

I am done apologizing for all the little things she finds fault with, daily.  I apologized in spades for all the big things. Not once has she apologized to me for the suffering, the dislocation, she’s caused.

I remain grateful, which I don’t believe she accepts or understands. I don’t believe she accepts or understands that I still love her—even when I’m not happy with her. Her mind doesn’t work that way, and anyway she’s told me now many times she doesn’t love me (“I’ve fallen out of love with you.”) To love someone doesn’t mean they have to love you back.

That’s the tragedy of love.

This is my final week in my wife’s house. I’ve begun to wrap up the furniture I’m taking. Evidence of my moving out is now in every room. The oddness, the peculiar stasis of our relationship pervades the days like stale, heavy air. My wife has withdrawn even more, rarely initiating even the smallest of talk. Basically we only talk about our dog, our dog that I must leave behind.

I know she wants me gone as much as I need to be gone. Still, knowing that hurts.

I no longer have any expectations that she might say anything meaningful to me. Why would I even want that, knowing where it would be coming from?   I don’t need more judgment. She has already rendered the sentence.

I, too, have clarity of vision—it’s not my wife’s sole domain to claim as a clairvoyant. She misjudges me in her need at every turn to nullify my thoughts, to make me lesser than. I’m not paranoid; others have told me this is what they’ve seen. And what she does to them. It’s born from fear, not from cruelty. My wife is not a purposefully cruel person. Her unwillingness to extend empathy—stated as a fact—is not intended to be cruel, but to be brutal. There’s a difference.

I think we’re both worn out right now, being together too long under the dark cloud of divorce. It’s a word I hate: divorce. It’s an ugly word, to describe an ugly act.

divorce (v.)

1. 1400, divorcen, “to put away or abandon (a spouse); to dissolve the marriage contract between by process of law,” from Old French divorcer, from divorce(see divorce(n.)). Extended sense of “release or sever from any close connection” is from early 15c

I have been abandoned; put away. I have been severed from a close connection. Unilaterally.

An ugly word to describe an ugly act: a sledgehammered acknowledgement of what could have been, but what likely shouldn’t have been, and now won’t be.

No one likes endings. Sad endings. Unhappy endings. There’s too much real sadness in the world to inflict it at home, on someone you say you once loved, who loves you. It’s the smallness of the act, its essential smallness, that renders the person inflicting it a small person. Not an authentic person, a whole person; but a small person.

I know when the world shifted for my wife, and I became in no small part collateral damage. She may see it, too—though never expressed, how could she? She became severely depressed, stopped all intimacy, and withdrew. She couldn’t accept my support and needed to work out her life alone. That’s the place she resides today: alone.

Alone is a lonely place to be.

The unspoken words in my house are palpable. Words that ought to be said but are not. Conversations that never happen, or are heard only in my head. Silent dialog.

My wife is the kind of woman who always puts the other person on his back foot. That’s the way she defends herself. Her style of communication is one that demands a responsive need to defend, apologize, or make amends. She answers questions with questions. She is always right. She plays the superior professional psychologist’s card in subtle ways she may, at this point, not even be aware. It’s her second nature to evaluate, judge, and define.

Of late her stock reply to any comment I make about politics, the state of the media, goings on at our mutual swimming and rowing club, is, “and what are you doing about it?” It’s a put-down, and is meant as one. It’s a discussion ender, not an opening.

Perhaps this is her way of telling me in so many unsaid words that she can’t wait for me to be out of her house. She no longer tells me where she’s going. She doesn’t have to, though I tell her my whereabouts. I have to ask if I want to know. There is a margin of civility.

Her excuse about my writing holds little water. I understand her intense desire for privacy. I don’t share it, but can appreciate it in others. Yet, even after I removed my chronicle from my blog she continues not to communicate.

So all bets are off.

It’s hard for me to understand how my wife might describe a love relationship. Is there underneath her deep need for independence an actual desire to be loved by someone? She rejected my love for her. My loving her was not what she wanted, or wanted in some way foreign to me, that I was unable to fulfill. She never asked me to be any way with her, except not to be so present, so there all the time. I think my loving her was a burden—that within herself there was no way she could return my love so she had, in the end, to reject it as being too much.

What I’ve found hurtful has been her inability to accept me as I am, as a whole and complete person who’s OK as he is. Since the beginning I’ve felt that my wife thinks of me as incomplete, a man needing to be better than he already is. Whatever I’ve done has been not enough. (She thinks of herself in the same way. Self-punishment and punishment of others go hand-in-hand.)

I don’t think she ever liked who I was, nevertheless finding it within herself to marry me. She said she responded to my OKCupid profile because I was a swimmer and loved books. That’s a beginning. Yet our backgrounds are entirely different, and mine, as a class and type, she condemns. When we told her good friend Lee we were getting married he spent an hour exhorting her not to marry me. In front of me he repeatedly said, “You can’t marry him.” What kind of fiancé accepts that? I should have stepped aside then and there. Lee remains her friend and I am divorced. Now I know what kind of fiancé she was.

If my wife were to talk to me, now, in these last two weeks of being together, what would I say to her? I cannot presume to know what she would say to me beyond what she’s already said.

I would say that I loved her, and love her still.

I would say that I need to be away from her, from her judgments and fault-finding.

I would say that I know in my head that a better life awaits me.

I would say that my heart yet aches.

I would say that everything I’ve said and written is true for me, without distortion, hyperbole, or exaggeration.

I would say I resent her refusal to find another way to be together.

I would say I don’t know how we could be together. But not seeking a way is a moral failure.

I would say I want to be alone for a while.

I would say I will miss her forever.

Almost as dismaying as my wife’s decision to end our marriage is her silence on her own role in its unraveling. From her lofty position as a doctor of neuropsychology she can only forensically analyze my behavior as falling short. My desire for togetherness has been judged a fault, one cause of her withdrawal. Not once has she looked in the mirror at her own psychic contributions.  Not once has she examined how she might also have been the cause in the matter.

What I have experienced over the past five years is a woman incapable, or unwilling—if there’s a difference—to share her life with a man. This has been her history over a long time. Many have told me this. Yes, my wife shares her house; she shares some of her time, on her terms. She does not share her emotions, nor her vulnerability.

Somewhere long ago she learned not to trust men, never to be vulnerable, never to be truly open and let anyone inside. During our time together she experienced many losses: of career, health, friends. I couldn’t be a solace to her. That wasn’t permitted. When she grieved, she grieved alone. I was always provisional.

Her reflexes are to attack if approached suddenly. The outside world is a threat. Once when walking from our house to the corner of the block I fell behind to tie a shoe and when I ran to catch up her startled reaction was to karate chop me. Only in the final flash did she realize that it was me and not a predator. I would have been taken down.

Her fierce need for independence couldn’t even embrace the social nicety of being introduced as my wife. That implied, she said, that she was my property, as though we lived in the 16^th century.

I honestly don’t know why she said yes when I asked her to marry me. She said she loved me…but her love came bounded by so many private restrictions. Later, after she told me she no longer loved me and was ending our marriage, she said she was a better friend than a partner. I see that now in her friendships, especially with friends who are dying. If you’re dying you would want her by your side.

Why can’t she take responsibility for her own lack of communication, her hints and private resolve not letting me know her true intentions? Or her abandonment of our marriage vows, our marriage commitment? Or her never saying no she was not willing to work out a new way of being together, and letting me think for over a month we were living into a solution, not an ending?

Or accepting her role in stopping sex, or even talking to me about it. It just ended on January 20, 2016.

Or her refusal to visit the places I love; to visit Maine or Bowdoin; or to accompany me on trips to see my boys in Boston and New York. She never felt the need to be part of my family—and had little interest in me being part of hers. She never had any expectation that I should join her when visiting or having dinner with her daughter. If I wanted to, that was fine.

There was her life and there was my life and she believed that that total separation was normal, and to want more was a character flaw.

I have searched my own soul and confessed my shortcomings—to which she will not comment.

What I have come to realize belatedly is that my wife distrusts men. She may even at some deep visceral level hate men.  It comes out in a thousand little ways.  I don’t say this to be vindictive.

She may say she likes this man or that man; or that she even may love, for a time, this man or that man. But these likes and loves fall under a smothering blanket of distrust and fear. All men are guilty until they prove otherwise, at least for a time. When a man gets too close, or wants to be close, she cannot sustain the relationship. She ends it.

The men my wife likes are an odd lot. Her closest male friend (and I’m not including her former lover now gravely ill) is so self-effacing as to be barely present; another is cruel, obnoxious, and a coward; two others are gay.

How men occur to my wife—men as a class, not individuals—is that they take women’s space. They violate their bodies, take their role in society, take their jobs, their pay, their personal agency. At worst they are rapists, thieves, child molesters, serial killers. (She has an abiding interest in serial killers.) It’s not an accident of fate that her work today involves interviewing violent men, men who have committed horrible acts of aggression and violence mostly against women and children. How better to confirm one’s deepest beliefs and fears than to face them directly in the flesh, to have to listen to their chilling stories.

On the day in April when my wife told me she had not agreed to work things out and had already contacted an attorney, she said that she may likely die a lonely old woman, as though it was my fault: that our five years together had somehow stolen her opportunity to find lasting love. Were these same five years not my opportunity cost, too? Had I, too, not paid dearly? More dearly, since it’s my life being turned upside down? Her insistent assertion that her life is just as disrupted, just as impacted as mine is laughable. Only an insensitive, selfish person would say these things, would see the situation they were creating so one dimensionally.

I don’t wish her to die a lonely old woman. Having caused so much unhappiness she deserves to be happy herself. Or how vain and foolish this marriage dissolution would be.

I don’t want to die a lonely old man.

I’m not going to.

We sleep in the same bed, never touching. Our dog sleeps sprawled at our feet or between us. In the morning he often burrows down under the covers. It’s been this way for over three years, well before the February 9^th declaration. Nothing new to which divorcing added a sudden unwelcome dimension. It’s been a barren bed for a long time.

Is sex important in a marriage? Does having no sex three out of the four years of being married count as actually being married? Should I have believed my wife’s reasons then, or her revised assertions now? I know how the situation occurred to me. No sex is no sex. Depending on the circumstances, I could be compassionate or resentful—but that’s my internal state, not the fact of the matter. The fact of the matter, the action, was that a deep, intimate connection went missing. And I settled for it.

In eighteen days my moving pod arrives. Another three days and I’m gone. I say goodbye to our dog; I leave the house. I wonder if she is counting the days as I am. I imagine she is.

Our final days together are a superficial re-enactment of all the other days, as though our time together will stretch on and on. Who walks the dog; who chops the onion while the other spins the lettuce; little reminders to be sure to clean out the sink; who will let the gardeners in; who buys what at our respective farmers’ markets.

I don’t know what I expected. Surely there are words of parting to be said; or not. What I realize is that I really don’t know this woman, and that what has been revealed is sadly unattractive. To know more now, at this late date, after the end has been written, is neither helpful nor nourishing in a life sustaining way. It would only subtract. Put the past in the past. I don’t need to be adding more past to the past.

Earlier in this chronicle of my unraveling marriage I conjectured about what it might be like to come back together someday, what would have to change, be different. That I still loved her.

Love is a funny, so indefinite, state of being. Yes, I do still love my wife. Or I love the memory of the woman I fell in love with. I still see that woman, fleetingly, in the woman today who is divorcing me. She’s still there, under layer upon layer of self-protection. She calls it independence.

Tonight at dinner I commented that I found it remarkable that so many people at the South End spent so much time there without their partners, not just for the sports activities, but for the now weekly social events, the happy hours, impromptu dinners, the bar that seems now always open. My wife’s predictable response was that not all people held my view of relationships, that people lived independent lives.

Independence is one thing; not living a life together is another. Maybe I am too dependent on companionship, shared experience, trudging that happy road of destiny together.

I think back to the early days of our romance. Like many athletes, my wife has a quilt sewn from the many swimming event T-shirts she had collected. One T-shirt, commemorating a South End swim, has a photo of one of her former lovers on the front, a man I know, and like. This quilt was on her bed. She was truly surprised when I said I didn’t want to sleep, much less make love, immediately under his picture. It was inconsequential to her. Was this a sign I should have noticed, or heeded? Or that I would be asked to take her first husband, still her friend, swimming in the Bay? On that day, we could have been three of my wife’s lovers, all together sitting naked in the South End sauna. Am I over sensitive to think that’s weird? This is experience I don’t have. Maybe there are men who share women over time, and even talk about it, talk about what it was like. That’s not me.

So today I’m thinking about what loving this woman means. It definitely does not mean loving the fact she’s dissolved our marriage, evicted me from her house, moved me out and moved me on. Can she be separated from these acts?

Time will tell. Not today.

This evening on the bus returning home from visiting my friend Ray in the hospital recovering from lung cancer surgery I was so lost in dismay I overshot my stop by nearly ten blocks.

Since the 2016 election—if winning the vote but losing the contest is really an “election”—every day brings some kind of bad news. It’s become part of the atmosphere. But this past week has been especially, horrifically bad: thirty-nine dead from consecutive mass shootings; no gun laws and a controlling government unwilling to legislate restrictions; a reprehensible President, stoking fear and violence; the country’s legacy of bigotry, racism, and exclusionary policies coming home to roost. More locally in San Francisco it’s a rare day I don’t encounter either a homeless person on the bus, sadly filthy and stinking from life on the streets, or a raving mad person screaming obscenities at everyone and no one. The streets themselves are littered with refuse, excrement, filth—no neighborhood escapes this fate.

And “returning home” is a euphemism. I don’t have a home. I live in a house I’m moving out of, or more harshly, from which I’ve been asked—no, mandated—to leave. Every day a little bit more of me is packed into a box, awaiting the end of the month when all the boxes get packed in a storage pod and taken away, to await their own time when they can be shipped to some new place on the other side of the country. New place. New life.

In truth, though no fault of my wife, I haven’t really had a home here…a home being a place of comfort, familiarity, family, and refuge. My wife to be graciously made room—more than room—in her house for me to share. I was never made to feel like a tenant (until I was told to move out) but nevertheless I felt like one. I was always conscious of living in someone else’s house, intruding on her space.

In the meantime, my wife and I live side by side in a surreal calm of purposeful compatibility. Apart from my packing, one would never know we are a divorcing couple. There’s no surface tension, no drama; there’s nothing personal. We mostly prepare dinner and eat together. We talk about the dog, the wind, the South End, the people in the nearby park. We never talk about us. But she has withdrawn herself and blames her silence on my writing. So be it. Every day her presence fades just a tiny bit more. Every day she’s becoming someone I once knew, once loved. I truly want to hold those memories.

In twenty days my storage pod arrives at the curb and my life here gets packed inside. A few days after that I leave and this house returns to pre-Niland condition. I want no tearful farewells. I don’t even know what I’ll say.

Will I say,“ I love you still?”

Will I say, “Please say nothing?”

Will I say nothing?  Will I cry?

I don’t know.

I was with a friend tonight who knows my wife well, for far longer than I’ve known her, and he said, “The world needs more kindness, not more division and strife.”

More kindness.

I believe my wife thinks, within the clarity of her decision to dissolve our marriage, that she is being kind. That her agreement to my terms, in exchange for no contest to the divorce, is a kindness, a kindness of process. In truth, this mutual agreement is a money saving strategy, and one that saves a lot of mutual agony, too. Kindness is a by-product, not the motivator.

She told me tonight she no longer talks to me about what’s happening between us because I write about it. She thinks I’ve misquoted her, or taken her words out of context. I have not misquoted. Context is subjective. Perhaps the mirror I hold doesn’t reflect the image she prefers. No one likes mirrors. I didn’t when she told me she no longer loved me, didn’t trust me, and intended to dissolve our marriage. Not a very attractive reflection. It hurt.

Frankly, I’m not that interested in hearing what someone with her uncompromising, fixed, unchangeable worldview has to say.  She epitomizes T. S. Eliot’s quip about Henry James,

‘He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it.” No new idea has ever violated her mind—far from it. It would undermine her rigid idea of herself.

Before that there was only escape, running away.

I only know the few details she permits herself to reveal about what went on in her youth. Her family didn’t listen to her; she acted out. They tried to control her. She bolted. I don’t know how a teenager actually leaves their family, but she did, and moved to California. It took fortitude and courage…and desperation.

In all that I’ve written I have been as self critical as critical of her. In light of her complaint, I’ve taken down many blog posts, but still she won’t talk to me about our relationship. It’s all only conversational small talk: current events rather than authentic conversation.

I think the blog complaint was, in the end, a ruse, a good excuse not to talk. I know my wife is very private about her life. She dislikes most social media, isn’t on Facebook (though posts on Instagram and Strava—so selective.)

Maybe I should be grateful she’s not talking to me. It would inevitably get emotional, especially since she has not once reflected to me about her role in this, her deficiencies as a wife and partner. You don’t withdraw sex from three fourths of a marriage without so much as an explanation (apparently the one she gave at the time was false since when I quoted her words to me about it she accused me of “diagnosing” her.)

I would love to ask her, “what would it be like being married to someone not always trying to please you?”

In my recent course at UCLA we investigated rackets, the rackets we play on ourselves and others. They come with a payoff, but always at a cost.

I wrote this:

Currently I am engaged in the Being a Leader leadership course.  During the course I came to realize that I have been running, what in this course is called, a “racket” with you.  I have come to see this is not a productive way of being and it has actually cost our relationship something I am no longer willing for you or me to continue paying.

While it is probably obvious to you, what has not been working for me, or you, is that my default way of being is being the “good” man in our relationship.  By this I mean I have defined myself as the flexible partner, the one always trying to please and willing to compromise, as though these behaviors were admirable.

What I now realize is that the issue identified above has persisted because there has been a payoff for me in running this racket.

The payoff that I now see is that this racket has allowed me to be right, to occupy a moral high ground that when not appreciated by you allows me to be the wronged party. My racket has been based on the paradigm that there is always a right and a wrong in any situation.

What I have also come to realize is that running this racket on our relationship has cost me your trust, your love, and our marriage.

I leave you with my word that in any new future we may create this racket will be no more.

Love always,

Niland

There has been no response to this, not an acknowledgement, not even a fuck you, not anything. I read this in tears to a hundred people and half of them cried, too. But my wife—now ex-wife—says nothing.

One of my young group members—our groups were very personal—when he learned of my situation, wrote to me:

It must be hard for you that your wife did not respond to the letter you wrote for her.

I think that brings me to the two concepts from our workshops regarding integrity and language (communication).

Regarding integrity, it was that though we have to expect ourselves to act with integrity and authenticity, that we are not necessarily guaranteed to receive the same behavior back from those we interact with.  And unfortunately this may be an example of one of those situations.

 I also wonder if her silence may be interpreted as a form of communication (though minimal) through action? Possibly one where she is communicating an unwillingness to discuss matters any further?

Maybe our last month together should remain small and easy.

I don’t need sleepless nights, and neither does she.

Put the past in the past.

The latest statistics from the American Psychological Association, and other similar sources, indicate that approximately 45-50% of first marriages in America end in divorce; 65-68% of second marriages end in divorce; and about 75% of third marriages. Women initiate over 60 % of all divorces.

These are sorry data points. The chances aren’t good.

I am my wife’s third husband; she is my second wife. She unilaterally initiated the dissolution of our marriage. Was I a statistic waiting to happen, an exponential inevitability that only keen and mutual self-awareness, deep listening and communication, and a commitment to something bigger than ourselves could have forestalled?

I have fought my entire life never to be swept up in a trend, and here I am decidedly “on trend,” like gray rooms with darker shades of gray trim. Gray indeed.

Being a likelihood doesn’t mitigate the sadness. Or my abiding conviction that it didn’t need to be this way.

I was out for dinner with my son Adam last night at a new local reasonably fashionable restaurant called Pearl. Among the tables of thirty-something hipsters were several tables of attractive couples in their sixties or older. They were talking and laughing, sharing plates, enjoying each other’s company. I had seen one couple walk in holding hands. I wanted to be them. This is how I saw my life proceeding. Life isn’t all a joyous meal, but growing comfortably and lovingly old together—trudging the happy road of destiny hand in hand—is a vision I long for…and apparently can’t achieve. It makes me very sad.

Sadness can be an opportunity to express one’s humanity. It can over time heal loss. Experiencing loss with authentic sadness, poignant sadness, begins the healing process.

When it triggers the reactivation of earlier losses it doesn’t heal anything. It’s a life sentence of heartache.

A few days ago an online photo service I’ve used sent me a promotional email titled Your Memories From 2010. Among the dozens of favorite pictures taken of all my boys, Bowdoin, the Maine coast, and Midwood were photos of EL—photos whose originals I had destroyed, burnt in my Russian Hill fireplace, never wanting to see them again. The pain they had formerly produced was gone. I was glad to see them, to see her, and to remember the times when they were taken. They made me smile.

Put the past in the past.

I’ve come to realize that the opposite of being a good man isn’t being a bad man. That’s always been my equation in life. The opposite of a “good” man is being an authentic man, a man of integrity. There’s no good or bad in it. Integrity and authenticity are never ending endeavors—mountains without a top.

I know I often stumble at both. These falls have been a failing in my marriage. It’s often a steep climb up these mountains. The only way to access authenticity and integrity is being authentic about your inauthenticities, and to recognize when out of integrity.

I’d like to talk about this with my wife but there’s been a quiet yet distinct shift in the house since I returned from Los Angeles and the course at UCLA. The clearing for authentic conversation has been covered. I had hoped, now that the die has been cast–legal papers filed, moving plans made, both of us looking ahead to new, separate lives—that we could talk to each other like people who once loved one another.

Our conversation is the smallest of small talk. Nothing remotely personal is mentioned. Brenda didn’t ask one question about the course I took, or what its impact was, despite aspects that were directly shared. Thank god we have the dog to focus our attention; otherwise the silence would be deadly.

I am afraid to say anything. I have been cordoned off into a Quiet Zone.

One key goal of the course was to experience what it would be like to be free—free to be and free to act; to leave behind the way we wound up being; free to choose beyond the way we wound up being. This means facing squarely all the ways we’ve been inauthentic, out of integrity. Only out of that fearful recognition can freedom be forged. Only then can we ever be out here with life.

Right now it’s hard to know what this looks like. I have to risk giving up everything I get about myself in order to deal with life. I have to give up all the judgments I make about myself. Quit deciding things, and ask Who am I really?

We don’t see, and we don’t see what we don’t see. Too often we walk around in tranquilized obviousness. We go through the motions, at life’s petty pace. I went through the motions in my marriage, and took for granted that the way we were living, even when unsatisfactory, was just the way it was. It was good enough even when it wasn’t. I should be grateful that she had her clarity of vision to say it wasn’t working.

I can’t speculate about all the reasons she felt so sure that our marriage couldn’t be saved—with work, and talking, with authenticity and integrity regained.

I would have given all to try.

Yet….now, on my own, a chance to figure out Who I Really Am.

Free to be, free to act.