PERSONAL ESSAY
After My Zoom Divorce, I Tried to Run Away from My Pain and Trauma
But stowaway grief ghosts crashed my “Eat, Pray, Love” moment
“So, what will this new life look like?” my therapist Cheryl asked. “When the divorce becomes final, what do you imagine yourself doing? Where do you see yourself living?”
Of the many thought-provoking questions she’s asked me over the years, I answered this one a little too loud and a little too fast, with a desperate urgency. “I will be living in a very tiny apartment with only one key.”
“One key?”
“Yes, just one key.”
“Hmm,” she replied. But not an “Interesting…tell me more” type of hmmmm. A short, compact hmm, that came from the back of her throat and carried the weight of her doctoral dissertation.
“I know, I know.” My surrendering hands flew up in front of me. “There’s a lot of psychological crap poppin’ off there, but truly all I want is my own place, my own space. I just want to disappear.”
The slight arch of her right eyebrow told me she knew exactly what and whom I was desperately trying to deadbolt out of my life. It was my pathetic attempt to control the firehose of heartbreak aimed relentlessly at me and my family for the past thirty-some-odd years.
So many Job-like tragedies had run on a parallel track during my struggling marriage, there simply wasn’t time to properly grieve or process it all. Death, cancer, house fires (yes — plural), murder, mental illness, and so much more hit our family with such mind-numbing regularity that I functioned in an unsettled state of constant alert, permanent imbalance, and plus-sized paranoia.
The suffering was suffocating in this place where I should be living and loving. I wanted out.
We looked at each other.
Now the short “hmm” came from the back of my throat, a sad half-smile resting in reality, “I know, I know.”
My marriage did blessedly end.
In the months leading up to that, my mother passed away and we found out my oldest brother was dying from glioblastoma brain cancer. My incubating ex and I decided it was not the time to unload our personal dump truck onto the family collective and so we planned under the radar.
It was a surreal experience navigating such a life-altering experience effectively alone and amid a communal and worldwide WTF moment.
After my brother died and we were on the virtual doorstep of the divorce hearing, we decided to tell the family. By then, all semblance of what I thought this moment would look and feel like had disappeared; the news was landing understandably as very “beige.”
The first time I actually saw my lawyer’s face was at the Zoom hearing for the official judgment. (Yup, you too can get divorced over Zoom. Who knew?) He seemed shorter than I imagined, but he was sitting down. He had fried my last ass cheek a few months before when he told me to “calm down” as I explained a significant error that he’d made in the separation agreement.
The chirpy judge sported a lively St. Patrick’s Day tie and chatted up my soon-to-be ex about evening plans. It was over and done in about six minutes and thirty-five seconds minus the ‘Best Irish Bar in Boston’ banter.
As they all logged off, I was left staring dumbfounded at the black Zoomed-out screen, uttering the now banished words “Wait, what?”
For the record, I have had bathroom trips that lasted longer than my divorce hearing. Before I could follow that train of thought, I lowered my laptop cover and said very biblically to no one in particular, “It is done.” My next utterance was not so Gospel-friendly, “I gotta get the bleep out of here.”
This overstuffed trauma sandwich had made me a flight risk.
I took money from my re-mortgaged home and ferociously began planning an extended getaway to a small Caribbean Island. I hate to fly, can’t drive British style, am insanely paranoid about catching COVID, not to mention I hadn’t been alone with myself for more than two days in over thirty years. But I uploaded my negative COVID test, blew kisses, and threw air hugs to my loved ones.
Then I ran like a damn holy fool down the jetway, skidding to a sloppy stop in seat 2A. My first-class invisible new life had begun.
I’m really doing this!
As the landing gear snapped back into its compartment, it hit me.
Oh sh-t, sh-t, sh-t, what am I doing?
Sweet Baby Jesus lying in the manger, what have you gotten yourself into? You do not know a soul. You are completely alone. Mom, Dad, Steve, Mimi, and Paula are gone, you are never going to see them again…Oh my God, you are divorced!
Then it got really personal.
Just what are you going to do down there? You are ancient! Your boobs cannot even be classified as boobs anymore. That lawyer fried your last ass cheek, but three others have replaced it. Oh no worries, you’ll get plenty of alone time…
That personal crap came out of nowhere, buried beneath the laundry pile of so much that was so awful. But there it was in all its glory, tangled up in my trauma and stinking up the joint, just waiting to jump into my arms. Safe to say by the time we landed, this church fool was having a crisis of faith and my invisibility cloak was nowhere to be found.
After zombie walking through the terminal, I numbly loaded my luggage into the rented SUV and closed the door. The silence was as thick and hot as the tropical air. I called the property manager for my apartment, and she told me to GPS the address, that she would meet me there.
I sat there for a while, trying to will the medicine of my bright and beautiful surroundings to take effect.
She was waiting when I arrived and after a quick run-through of the property, she led me up the short flight of stairs to my apartment. She apologized for rushing off as she handed me the key and said she’d be back later to answer any questions.
As I turned to the door and held the key out, my hand stopped.
Everything came bubbling up. Panic started rising forcefully in my chest. My breath sharpened. I inhaled each nasty thought, now in sick rhythm with my pounding heart, completely exposed.
Vulnerable.
Terrified.
My head began to swirl. I closed my eyes.
Quick-cut images of every heartache and trauma ever experienced played like some perverse retrospective film. What are you doing, what are you doing, what are —
“Hey,” she shouted, slamming on her brakes, “I’ll see about getting you a backup, but for now that is your only key!”
I turned but only caught the back of her Jeep as she peeled out, making me question to this day if I actually heard what I heard. The shock of the words washed over my panic attack like freezing water, and I stood there dripping for what felt like thirty years.
Slowly a realization began to bubble up from my gut to my heart to my brain.
I could run, even hide for a good chunk of time, but I could never be invisible. I was still painfully observable to myself.
Everything I’d ever gone through was now securely knitted into my DNA. Although not visible to the eye, its woolly presence had carte blanche to scratch its sorrowful head against my heart regardless of my actions.
This futile effort of trying to rip it out of my life now seemed juvenile and ridiculous. I’d managed to run quite far, but in the wrong direction.
I could almost feel the gentle push from behind as this new understanding began to ease about my body, palpably shifting and softening the resistance of muscles and tendons of so much buried pain.
I had to move intentionally into all the pointed edges of my grief and consciously enter those deep, deep, caverns. I had to learn how to carry this pain in a softer way, inviting its need for expression, validating its presence and importance.
It was not the life I had hoped for, and it certainly was not going to be easy, but I had to share the life I wanted with the one I had been given.
As I stood there making peace with this non-negotiable, tingling pins and needles ran under my skin. The grief ghosts of my past — slowly waking up from their anesthetized slumber — now moved about, waiting for my hand of friendship.
I took a deep breath, lifted my face to the sun, and exhaled all that I thought I knew, about all that I thought I knew.
The pull of a half-smile started to curl upward on my lips. I took another deep breath and turned back to the door. Shoulders squared, I looked directly into the empty space now filled with the energy of my next move.
Damn girl. This tiny apartment is about to get very crowded.
And then,
I jammed that mother-effing single key into the door and flung my life wide open.
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