For a long time, whenever any friend would respond to my news of divorce with the concerned surprise I’d come to expect, I’d be quick to respond with some bumbling combination of, “We’re all doing okay,” and “Yes, it’s hard,” and “But we did do five rounds of therapy over our 13 years.” I wanted to add too, “And the books! I read so many books!” I wanted to carry around a photo of my nightstand, stacked with copies of ACT with Love and Attached and everything the Gottmans had ever written.
I felt compelled to ensure our efforts toward reconnection did not get missed, believing on some level it helped preserve my integrity as psychotherapist and as a person who believes deeply in the power of love and of reconciliation. Or maybe I just needed to feel like someone who would do things to fight for her family. Really, I wanted the fact of our repeated showing up in mostly dingy office parks (and on Zoom) to validate that this wasn’t the impulsive or misguided decision that I feared deep down it might be.
It’s been a few years now since I’ve gotten those surprised looks, and life is vastly different. As I sit here writing this, I’m waiting for my partner – whom I married in our backyard several months ago – to get home from work. Life is far from easy, but marriage is nowhere on the list of painful anymore. This partnership is life-giving. It’s taken me to depths I had never felt safe to go. It’s beautiful.
And perhaps precisely because of that safety and depth and beauty, and because I’m no longer in a season of answering to other’s reactions and can more fully look toward my own, I can finally say that I have deep regret about getting divorced. Or perhaps more accurately, I have deep regret about how I arrived at divorce. They are different statements, but they may be more connected than I like to admit.
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When our marriage seemed to be disintegrating at a faster rate, one of us used the word divorce for the first time. I remember him saying it first (he may disagree) and hearing it in that moment as a severing of a contract. We weren’t a couple who had let ourselves ever go there – as if naming that which shall not be named would bring its possibility close, and forevermore curse our home. And I guess it did. But not because of some power that the inherently word holds, of course, but because I myself imbued it with so much power. We couldn’t even speak the prospect of an end.
The moment the concept was surfaced was the moment that I let myself feel abandoned. While of course I had spent plenty of time in my own tortured mind thinking about that exact possibility, the idea of him or us both thinking about it felt like too much to take. This comes down, on some level, to my inability at the time to really allow for him as a distinct and separate person. I had some serious growing up to do.
But at the time, I couldn’t yet tolerate the idea of an ending, and my reaction to it was to spin out. To distract myself. To get even more resentful. To accelerate our end for fear that it was now coming anyway. In relatively short order – though it felt like plenty of time at the time – I let him know that we should indeed no longer be married. He wasn’t totally sure, but I now was. Those therapy appointments and books had been for naught, I decided. We were done.
As I look back on this time now, at least in my most self-compassionate moments, what I want to tell that broken-hearted and dissociated woman is to slow the fuck down (said lovingly). I want to wrap her in my arms and say, “I know this feels utterly intolerable, but let me help me slow your heart rate, pace your breathing, and know that you can take this one hard day at a time. There’s a lot to do here, internally and externally, but we’re not going to rush it. You are okay. You are not alone.”
At the time, I was lacking in the skills and practices and patience I needed for that though, and so instead I responded to the idea of an end with urgency. If we’re done, we’re done, and I need to move on.
When I say that I regret my divorce, what I mean is that I actually don’t know what would have happened if I had been able to show up to the experience of a marriage in crisis in a different way. It feels weird and uncomfortable to allow in my mind or on this page for the possibility that maybe our marriage could have survived.
Our culture wants a tidy story. If it ended, it’s because that was the only possible happy ending. But I’ve come to realize that that’s just not how this brutal and beautiful life works. We want there to be a correct door to be chosen and then to be able to look back and say, “I got it right! Thank god!” But there are no correct doors. There are only the ones we choose.
To my former husband’s immense credit, he proposed one more round of therapy as the light was fading on our marriage. I said no. I’ll never know if that would have “saved” our marriage – if it would have finally bridged the gulf we had been feeling for so long. To my new husband’s immense credit, he’s sat with me while I’ve cried, letting myself feel the weight of this. When my heart is being clamped in a vice on Thanksgiving Day with my children far from me, it’s impossible not to grieve the me that didn’t try one more time.
At the same time, there was a part of me that felt it knew one more round of therapy wasn’t the answer, and I want to honor her too. But what I let that part – the one that somehow knew that there was something different and better for both of us out there, that we could be better people and parents living apart – do was to lead from urgency and avoidance. Because what I really wanted to avoid was the process – the experience – of an end.
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We as a culture are absolutely terrible at endings. We seem to rage against them at nearly all costs, though often in subtle and less perceptible ways. But regardless of how explicit our avoidance of them is, the fact remains that we hate them.
Perhaps our ghosting culture in dating is the most readily accessible example, but our inability to say, “This was nice, but not for me,” is hardly limited to app-based meetups. We hold on to friendships – or at least the nagging sense of obligation to them – for long past their viable life. We hold on to religious or family traditions that no longer hold resonance because they are what we have always done or out of guilt or shame at releasing them. We hold on to identities that we’ve long outgrown.
adrienne maree brown talked on a podcast I heard recently about how often this phenomenon plagues organizations and businesses. As a social strategist, she sees so many institutions that emerged in response to something vital, did a beautiful piece of work, and then spend the next many years trying to reinvent and reinvent to stay relevant, to limited success. It’s all to avoid having to say, “This has served its natural purpose. We can now let it go.”
I don’t know about you, but even reading the words, “We can now let it go,” brings up a tension in me. I can feel the grief and the resistance rise, a signal to me of how hard this is to acknowledge. My railing against endings has infected so many areas of my own life, a fact I’ve only more recently come to see with fresh eyes.
What’s complicated is that the resistance to endings doesn’t always look like fighting for the thing to remain. Sometimes, like in the case of my marriage, it’s emotionally disengaging or accelerating things. Sometimes it looks like slinking off in the cover of night by stopping responding as often to someone’s outreach. Or sometimes it is continuing to pour into something far beyond what I should because I just don’t want to say goodbye.
Endings are, of course, mini-deaths. Or perhaps not even mini. Each ending that we experience or allow to happen is a death that we must reckon with. And there is perhaps no better example of how a culture handles endings as how it approaches death. If we take this as true, Western, and particularly American, culture might be considered the most uncomfortable. We won’t even let our faces look like they are changing, must less allow ourselves to fully grieve the loss of children killed another day in another classroom. We rail against change and death with a 50-billion dollar anti-aging industry and filling our feeds with platitudes when horrific losses happen. We will do almost anything to avoid fully feeling it.
Why do we struggle so much with facing endings? One answer might be that the concept of endings harkens for us our deepest existential fears about ultimate endings – our own deaths. But to go another step, we might then ask why we as a society find even the concept of our own eventual death – a fact we obviously know and can’t avoid – so intolerable. It can feel strange to even ask such a question, so embedded is the idea in our culture of our individual lives and values.
But we might not know that there are indeed cultures that don’t struggle with this in the same way that we do – ones that have made death a more embedded part of life. And these cultures, I would suggest, also don’t suffer with endings in the way that we do, because if you observe the end not as a failure, but as a natural part of the cycle, you approach it very, very differently.
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The culture that has been my main teacher in this realm lately is not a human culture, actually. It’s the culture of mushrooms. No, I don’t specifically mean psychedelic mushrooms, though absolutely plenty of people are finding end-of-life solace and other existential anxiety benefit from these in clinical trials. I mean any old mushrooms, of which there are about 14,000 varieties.
Mushrooms are having a moment, for sure. Any stop at World Market will tell you they are hot, and I personally hope this current cultural interest will inspire some of the deeper lessons of mushrooms to permeate. (If you can spare an hour and half, I highly recommend streaming the documentary Fantastic Fungi – if you aren’t a mushroom nerd yet, you will be.)
What mushrooms teach us about endings actually comes beneath the surface of the earth, in the mycelium networks that lattice through the ground in the most intricate patterns you could ever imagine. It’s the mycelium that are the messengers between trees in a forest, letting one tree know that another needs help and then carrying nutrients between them. The way that mycelium helped to sustain community and act as the literal brain of nature (they mimic neural networks) are astounding.
But back to endings. What mycelium does, in addition to all the communication and decision-making, is it decomposes. It breaks down the organisms that it reaches to its component molecules, allowing those molecules to be formed into something new and useful to the rest of the community.
Mycelium knows when something has exhausted its natural purpose. It knows when it’s done its job and can be returned to the earth. It doesn’t do this any more quickly or slowly than is needed. It happens at just the right timing. Mycelium lets things fall apart so that the energies of it can be used again. It lets something more beautiful be born next.
It’s no wonder to me that human cultures that are more connected to the earth and its life and seasonal cycles don’t struggle as much with endings, that they allow them. They see the mushrooms and the animals live and perish and maybe they don’t feel like it’s such a catastrophe when they realize the friend they made in high school doesn’t really vibe with them anymore. They know how to let go.
They also – and this is important – let themselves actually experience the endings. They don’t hide them. They ritualize them in ceremonies. They have actual language for them. They approach them with tenderness and love.
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I’ve been thinking a lot these days about what makes a good ending. It’s at the heart of a body of work that’s inside me – perhaps even in the form of the book I started if I can get myself more on track. In the meantime, though, there are examples of opportunities for good endings everywhere, and I’m trying to notice them.
A dear friend/colleague/employee is leaving my practice to go spread her wings and I notice how much more joy I have access to in this transition because we approached it with attention and care. We didn’t avoid the hard conversations that needed to be had, and we both stayed conscious of how we could own our own emotions and demonstrate love, even in a season of change.
Endings, I realize, can be tributes to the beauty of what was and what will be.
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My husband finally just walked in from work. He hangs his coat by the door and he kisses my head while I type away on my laptop. My kids are across town, which feels achy and longing, and okay. They are safe and they are loved. I am safe and I am loved.
Something beautiful has been reborn. And it doesn’t actually require me to answer the question of what might have happened if my former husband and I had given it one more shot at therapy. That’s not actually the point.
The point is that our life cycle ended. It wasn’t a failure, as I’ve written before. It enriched the soil for all of us to birth new things. I hold regret that I didn’t honor that cycle by slowing down the process, that I couldn’t be more present to it. There are things that would be different if I could have. And here we are, still growing.
