Life back

Eons and eons ago, I was moving out of the house I shared with my first wife Nancy. We married very young, she and I, and I was certainly the more extroverted one. Nancy went along for the ride for a while, taking on my interests and generally subsuming her personality in favor of mine. She was a Polish Catholic girl from Niles and this is what you did, as far as she knew.

Since I am prone to center of the Universe behavior, and was REALLY that way at 23, I didn't really notice or catch on to this dynamic. (And there was a good deal more to this, really. I'm simplifying history here. Nancy's family was monumentally scarred by alcoholism and traumas that Nancy only ever hinted at.) As time went by, we grew far apart, having little in common in the first place and things got more and more negative between us. Nancy initiated the divorce discussion, but in the end it was I who moved out, and our discussions continued after.

"I feel like I've got my life back," she announced. I was probably sarcastic about it, since I hadn't knowingly stolen her life and didn't know enough about young women to understand. There was enough collateral damage that I had my own wounds to lick.

Nancy took her own life a couple years ago. Her life, for what it's worth, didn't improve for long. She married a guy we both knew (a friend of ours attended the wedding and wore black, she was so pessimistic about the match), and they had a couple children - a boy and a girl. Eventually she and her husband divorced, but not before he held the children hostage at gunpoint and got the state involved in their lives. Nancy was a very self-conscious, almost paranoid person and I'm sure she was horrified. After her sister died, of years of MS, she said goodnight and apparently took pills she had in her purse. She left her son, estranged from her by all accounts, and a daughter.

As I drove to Iowa City yesterday morning to see my clients (a pleasure as well as a second job) the sun was shining and the last of the leaves were showing their color. I sipped my coffee and listened to music, reveling in my relatively new-found ability to travel independently, and feeling little if any back pain. It's been a long summer and now with the crisp air comes the easing of our burdens, our ability to again look at something like enrichment, something other than survival. And I knew then, how Nancy felt in that time she became more independent and before she saddled herself with an even worse relationship than the one we shared.

"I have my life back," I said, to no one, to everyone, and to Nancy, wherever her troubled soul now lies. I hope, for a while, she felt as good about it as I do.