Hard Assets… A Hard Lesson

Rebuilding one’s life after a major life change is a very personal event. One we all too often turn over to counsellors, therapists, and the like without giving ourselves the benefit of facing who we are, what we’ve become, but more importantly, where are we going. Divorce after many years of marriage is one such event.

Mine was after 18 years. Most of them I thought happy, nevertheless, 18 years came to an end one day. It was a contentious divorce, as many are, with battles fought over every asset, every point, and every line of the final decree. And one day it came to pass. Decreed on a Friday the 13th, I was to vacate our home for the weekend so she could get her ‘stuff.’ Stuff that we split down the middle, item by item by item, until all the possessions in our 3,800 sq. ft. abode were evenly split. Yes, a lot of ‘stuff.’

I left that next morning for a weekend trip to a neighboring resort and spent my time there entertaining myself and trying to keep from thinking about what was happening to my ‘stuff’ or how much of it would be missing or how much damage the house would suffer from her negligence in handling, or should I say, vindictive handling? I wanted to have friends pop by to see how things were progressing but restrained myself reminding myself that everything in the house was ultimately replaceable, save the many family heirlooms. Shoot, would she even lock the doors when she left?

I came back Sunday evening, fresh from my weekend and found the house where I left it, no broken windows, no damaged door jambs, no apparent fires set. Just sitting there, pretty much as I had left it. Pulling into the garage, it seemed totally unaffected from her removal of stuff. Looked pretty much the same as when I left. Entering the house, I walked around looking for signs of miscreant behavior or retribution and found none. In fact, it looked like she had not taken a thing!

So I got out the list. One by one I went down it and sure enough each subsequent item was no longer there. Gone. As I checked items off the list, the further I got into it I realized that all she took was crap. NONE of what she took was essential to my life, life in the house, or anything. It was all crap. And then it hit me. We argued for weeks with attorneys over that list and all she got was crap. All that arguing and bad feelings so she could have her crap. How selfish of her.

And then that thought too hit me square in the middle of my eyes. As I looked around, I looked hard at what remained. What remained? Crap. No different than the crap she took. Sure, there were useful items but the vast preponderance of stuff was simply crap. I too was guilty of selfishly fighting for crap. Crap that I definitely did not need and truly, crap I really did not want. But there it was, staring back at me. At the time, I thought it mocking my folly. Even if it wasn’t, it should have been.

My life was crap. My life was full of crap. There I sat with my stuff, and on the other side of town, there she sat with her stuff. One marriage destroyed and the whole thing was measured by how we divided our crap. A person, a relationship, a long term marriage, all reduced to an asset inventory, which at the end of the day was crap.

It is a cold, dark day when you come to the realization that ALL the things you saw in that other person was truly your own reflection coming back at you and everything that you thought you were building and collecting was of no value on its own. As part of a living relationship, a healthy marriage, they were vibrant things that reflected two hearts together as one. But once those two hearts split, the value of those things was gone. They became crap. The true value was in the relationship.