The uncertain yet inevitable return to life

It’s a curious and inspiring fact that, in the wake of disaster, life always returns. No matter the catastrophe – fire, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic blast, cataclysmic asteroid strike – life shifts to accommodate the new reality, then grows up to thrive therein.

We humans, removed as we are from natural rhythms, don’t see ourselves as participants in this process; thus we fight to preserve our unnatural order, such as it is, and we’re all too often shattered when our life order is wrested from our control and turned topsy-turvy. Some of us don’t survive the shock at all, and expire either by our own hand or by catastrophic breakdown; others shatter internally, never again finding a state that approaches what once passed for equilibrium. Still others join the ranks of the walking wounded, limping along and nursing wounds that may take years to heal, or may never completely heal at all. Finally, some few of us open our hearts to tidal change, allowing it to sweep away the past and to carry us into new futures that bring new challenges and new opportunities.

Where then -- I wonder from this dreadful threshold upon which fate has deposited me -- along this continuum will I fall, now that my own personal disaster is upon me? My marriage of sixteen years has, over the course of a few months seemed to come completely unraveled, leaving both my wife and I with the most completely broken hearts of our lives. Yes, we still love each other and yes, we both believe that nothing is more important than keeping our family intact. Still, we are traumatized by this turn of events and the maelstrom of ferocious conflict that has surrounded its unfolding.

Of course, at this awful “square one” of full disclosure and reckoning, even the scale of change remains uncertain – can I forgive all I've suffered at the hands of my beloved? Can she forgive herself for the same, as well as overcome her own personal heartbreak? Only time will prove capable of such divination.

For my part, I am deeply torn: on the one hand, I imagine the worst – having to leave her and start my life over as a single man, a repugnant and deeply sad prospect that is also strangely exhilarating (not in the typical “get a sports car and a twenty-something hottie” scenario, but rather the “reinvent yourself with a limitless palette of colors” one); on the other, vastly preferable hand I long for the thorough healing of this deep wound that lays between us, and to the resumption of the easy romance that characterized most of our last sixteen years.

The realistic formation of these questions, to say nothing of their answers, still lays at some distance; at this writing our marriage is the smoking ruin of ground zero at the foot of Mt. St. Helens; and we, the unlikely survivors, going about the motions of life with a shocked glaze in the eye that regards even the most familiar sights with a dazed and blinking unfamiliarity.

Most common of the recent expressions to pass our lips is the phrase “I don’t know,” for many of the things we believed most deeply have been shown to be wrong, and if such a thing can be, what then do or can we truly know? This affliction makes a merry joke of all the words thus passed in this weblog, and I can only wonder what the next chapter – of both this drama and this blog – might bring.