4:00pm Saturday afternoon, alone in Robin’s house in West Oakland, last afternoon living in California. Adam and Rachel are fetching me in about an hour. Dinner with them, then they will drive me to SFO and it’s over.

My friend Mark W recently shared a poem by a friend of his Maya Rachel Stein that captures precisely what I’m feeling:

“It looks like the sky is coming apart and together at the same time “

And the body is holding its losses like a fist.

And a fleshy hope is opening to an unprecedented vastness.

And whatever we think we are leaving behind will keep insisting.

And the things we desire will elude us.

And our efforts will pose as failure.

And we will not recognize how far we’ve come.

And we will solve one problem and create another.

And we will feel broken.

And we will not be broken.

And the silence will be deafening.

And we will love destructively.

And no one will appear to be listening.

And there will be too many doors to choose from.

And we will keep saying, “I don’t know how to do this.”

And we will be more capable than we ever imagined.

Goodbye San Francisco.

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

When you think about it, seriously think about it, it’s awfully peculiar how we ascribe meaning to days, dates, years, decades, centuries and eons, all the way to eternity. The days of the week each have their meaning. Maybe it comes from astrology. Here we are on a Tuesday, a Tuesday that also happens to be the last day of this year, 2019, the last day of the decade.

Wikipedia tells me that Tuesday comes from the Old English word Tiwes dæg. This was named after the Nordic god Tyr. Tyr was the God of War, like the Roman war god Mars, and Greek god Ares. In Latin, Tuesday is called Martis dies which means “Mars’s Day”.

Tuesday is considered to be an unlucky day in the Greek world because the Fall of Constantinople occurred on a Tuesday. However, Tuesday is considered a lucky day in Judaism because it is mentioned twice as a good day in the first chapter of Genesis.

So it’s hard to know what to make of Tuesday.

Today’s Tuesday however is December 31, 2019. I’m not sure whether today marks the last day I am legally married, or the first day of no longer being married. It’s a kind of  cusp between married and unmarried, significantly different sides of the same coin.

My birthday is the cusp between Capricorn and Aquarius, January 20^th. This coming year it’s on a Monday.

I think I’ll go with the Fall of Constantinople. It’s suitably dramatic for this Tuesday, December 31^st, 2019.

My Tuesday, December 31st, 2019.

In his New Yorker memoir The Art of Dying, Peter Schjeldahl writes about his daughter Ada asking Brooke his wife a question:

Ada asked her mother how to stay married. Brooke said, “Don’t get divorced.” If you don’t divorce, you are a hundred per cent married no matter what’s going on. I am so glad we stayed together that, for once in my verbose life, words to express it fail me.

Don’t get divorced.

Now there’s an idea. It’s an idea that implies a commitment beyond pleasing oneself, beyond believing that a life alone is better than a life together. Or that there’s a greener pasture out there, undiscovered, but surely better than the pasture we’re in.

It’s an idea bigger than oneself. It subsumes oneself into a cause greater than oneself.

“Divorce” comes from the Latin word “divortium” which means separation. It is also equivalent to the word “divort” or “divortere.” “Di” means apart and “vertere” means to turn to different ways.

 Divertere was also referred the meaning of divert, turn aside, separate or leave one’s husband. 

Leave one’s husband. Funny, it doesn’t say leave one’s wife.

Yes, she chose to leave her husband. Leave one’s husband sounds right.

Synonyms in Merriam-Webster: break up, decouple, disassociate, disconnect, disjoin, dissever, disunite, divide, part, ramify, separate, sever, split, sunder, uncouple, unlink, unyoke…

Of these I think she might like unyoke best. She saw marriage as some kind of yoke. Get that yoking bloke out of here!

Never call me your wife; it implies I’m your property. Yoked!

I’m not feeling particularly nostalgic. There’s no ache left in my heart. She wrenched that out over seven grinding months. She choses today to be a stranger, a ghost from the past, a former wife with no name that can be named.

Tuesday December 31^st, 2019. A gray day here in West Oakland, not too cold, not warm. Much like my marriage: not too cold, not warm. There were days of sunshine, a few golden afternoons, and moonlit nights. Those were real, and few. Then Payne’s Gray washed over our marriage, neither black nor white, not too cold, not warm.

I need the separation of the Continent.

I need the clash of seasons again in my life: bitter storms, thunder, snow, merciless July heat and humidity, chilled Autumn evenings, the warmth of Spring.

Again Schjeldahl:

Meaning is a scrap among other scraps, though stickier. Meaning is so much better than nothing, in that it defines “nothing” as everything that meaning is not. Meaning prevents nothing from being only nothing. The “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” Wallace Stevens noticed. The same nothing, but a difference of attitude.

The meaning of distance, of seasons, of separation. The same nothing, but a difference of attitude.

Let’s cheer 2020. Wednesday, January 1^st, 2020.

Wednesday has always been my favorite day of the week. For the past eleven years Wednesday is Cow Hollow, dinner with my friends, Gamine. New Wednesday rituals will emerge. I’ll find them. Give them meaning.

Welcome Wednesday January 1^st, 2020.

December 29, 2019

This is my last Sunday as a resident of California. It’s the last Sunday of the year, and the last Sunday of the decade. There’s some kind of poetic significance to this—it all lines up so well. Of course that’s just a story, the dates in and of themselves have no meaning. They have meaning only to me: the story I tell myself. They mark an ending.

In two days my marriage comes to its legal end.

The year ends; the decade ends; my marriage ends; my life in California ends. The narrative is almost too perfect.

At dinner last night with Ray—whose past year has been personally worse than mine with two bouts of cancer and other ailments—he mentioned that his sponsor suggested he look at where he is today, and what he has gone through during the year, as an accomplishment. Victory over poor odds. He’s alive, and looking good, and engaging in his life, out with friends, making plans. These are indeed accomplishments.

The future remains unknowable.

We are so often overwhelmed with misfortunes small and large that once beyond them we fail to register any success achieved. Things happen. Bad things happen. If we don’t die, aren’t maimed, we go on. We might be different men as a consequence. Maybe we have learned something important. Maybe things just happened. We try not to make bad things worse. That’s a moral obligation we owe ourselves and others.

Where do we go from here? Where do I go from here?

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

I want my life to flow forward without pain, or unhappiness, or poor health, without too limited resources, with the people I hold dear, with someone in my life to love, to be vital, to accomplish things, to be of service to others, to not suffer in death when that time comes.

Most of these plans won’t happen. Life doesn’t work out that way.

Yet I can live a life that manifests itself as meaningful. I can discover my values.

What I can accomplish is taking responsibility: responsibility for myself, my decisions, my responsibilities to others, to work, to my body, to my life. To not make anything worse than it already is. To not let people down.

To found my relationships with others on trust and truth.

To remain sober and committed to a life of sobriety in all its manifestations. To be free to be and free to act. To be there for my sons, for my friends. To do the things that matter. To take responsibility for being.

Her life with me did matter. That she ended it also matters. The end is where we start from.

Everyone says, so common wisdom goes, that fresh starts, new beginnings, are the revitalizing staff of life. They keep us young. They open new doors, new vistas, new horizons. New people enter our lives. What didn’t matter slips away.

I didn’t plan a fresh start. I didn’t plan my marriage to end. I didn’t plan my son to become ill. These things happened.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

What I have learned in sobriety is that accomplishment, however defined, must be for oneself. To do anything solely for someone else is to fail. It’s incomplete. When I first stopped drinking I told myself I did it for my sons, that I would never let them down again, never let my own life’s unmanageability be a burden on them. I did it for them.

And then I realized that, too, was a burden I placed on them, a burden they wouldn’t want. My commitment had to be for me, and being for me, and for me alone, the resulting lightness of being would benefit everyone. That caring for myself relieved them of caring for me. They have their own lives to care for.

That doesn’t mean we don’t care for each other. We care deeply. But it means our care is without strings. It’s free.

I’m sad that my marriage ended. Sad about the idea of marriage ending for me. Right now, I’m not sad not being with her. During the last years of our marriage, indeed three fourths of it, physical and spiritual nourishment wasn’t there. Sex and intimacy are a form of communication; we weren’t communicating. Let go of that negative power. I’m sad that it wasn’t so but that’s what happened.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;

The beginning lies on the other side of the country, today in the snow, far, far from this city of hills on the Pacific. There’s a future there that didn’t exist for me before. I don’t know what it is.

That I wanted my future to be here in San Francisco is another story, now a closed chapter in my life. It turned out to be a short story. Life didn’t turn out the way I planned.

Maybe there never was a plan, just a story. She’s part of that story, but no longer part of my life. Let it be.

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.