Each fall, each late September, early October, as the beautiful golden colors erupt; reds, yellows, oranges, golds – crisp, bright, bold. These colors are instead eclipsed by an overwhelming darkness. An immense and heavy void that weighs me down–pinning me back in time to moments that won’t set me free.

My heart would ache, physically ache, to the point that I literally thought that I might die, at the time… I wanted to. So each fall, for those few short weeks, I would trudge through the void, live in the darkness, at one with the silence. Until, it was silent no more. The fallen leaves would have lost their brilliance, now simply dull and brown. Crunching under foot, as I would walk along, the darkness fading to grey, the skies are themselves once again.

Through the recent completion of grief counseling, and understanding my loss, something I had never addressed; I brought a lot of things to the surface, without even realizing it. In doing so, I left myself open for easier access to old memories and having said memories trigger old feelings.

Within a brief period of time, the same incident happened twice, but it was the second incident that had me traveling back in hyper-speed fashion to an event nearly 27 years ago… My three oldest children were 3, 2 and the youngest just a few months old. There was a knock at the door-

What would happen next is all such a blur, but if I close my eyes I can see it in my mind, watching it replay like a silent movie. I would tell my two older children that we were playing a game, a “game” that consisted of seeing how quickly we could put all our necessary belongings into large hefty trash bags (we had no boxes) and put them outside before we go to Grandma and Papa’s house. We would play this “game” while the Fulton County Police looked on, so I had them go outside and put the baby in the swing and started packing.

I decided my little game excluded anything that belonged to my husband and tossed all his belongings into a spare room as I proceeded along, mumbling and cursing under my breath. I was so angry and embarrassed. One of the officers approached me, trying to say I could not leave the belongings I was throwing into the separate room, our friend who had arrived with him and his partner intervened, I heard him say he would take care of it. I simply looked at the officer and said something about “he didn’t care enough to make sure he paid our bills, I don’t give a shit out his stuff” and he nodded and backed away.

I don’t know how long it took, how quickly it takes one person, a mad (literally crazy and angry) woman to throw clothes and dishes and pictures and the things that within five mins you deem important into trash bags, but I got it done. The officers there, nor my friend, were not allowed to help me. I got all the kids favorite toys into the toy box, which they did carry outside for me. And when I said I was done, they barred the door shut and drove away. My friend loaded up the back of his truck with all our things and took the kids and I to my in-laws, my husband was still at this moment in time, MIA.

Once at my in-laws, we had a very frank conversation, “this is what he does” they said to me. They also told me when I had “had enough” they would help me get home. Home was Nebraska, and I know they were saying this because they would be leaving soon themselves, as they were preparing to move to Florida and my support system would be gone if something like this happened again. I merely smiled at them, stuck in denial and so blindly in love with their son. I told them I wanted to give him another chance. I would confront him about all this, his using, make him get help, but I wasn’t ready to give up on him. They said, OK, but I saw the worry, the disappointment in their eyes.

When my husband came home that night, to his parent’s home we did talk, he was full of regret and remorse, and full of promises to do better… he promised to get clean.

The next few weeks were pure chaos, he was gone either looking for work, working, or “at a meeting” and I really wanted to believe him, but all to often things didn’t stack up and I was just overwhelmed with the kids. His parents were often gone to Florida house hunting and their house was on the market and constantly in “stage” mode. Thank goodness they didn’t judge parents about screen time 30 years ago because my kids watched a lot of movies! It is the only way we could assure we kept grandma and papa’s house clean.

One of the last weekends at the very end, his parents were gone again, he was out working, this time supposedly on the house we would be living in when his folks moved. His new job included a house if he did some work on it before we moved in. So he was working on our house and I thought it would be nice to have a romantic dinner before his folks got back. I put the kids to bed early that night, and I as I sat there waiting for him, our dinner getting cold, my mind wandered back to just a few weeks before.

In all the weeks, even before the evection, since the baby had been born, I had felt so distant from him; this man whom I knew from the depths of my soul was indeed the love of my life, my soul mate, the one person who had seen the most broken pieces of me and didn’t care… who in fact had fixed so many of those broken pieces, but now, now he was breaking me in new places and I didn’t understand why? One evening we set there in our dimly lit living room, “borrowing” electricity from the neighbor’s outside outlet and he lit up his little pipe in front of me as he set there drinking another beer. By this time, he had stopped hiding it from me, and in that moment, all I wanted was to join him. To crack open a beer of my own and take a drag, or two, or three… but then something happened, the spell was broken, it was no longer silent. My youngest child, my sweet baby girl was crying from her bassinet, and I know God intervened, reminding me I had a baby to feed and care for and on that night I didn’t drink or use.

Instead I fed my child and was silently angry, quietly resentful to the man who sat across the room from me, oblivious to our presence. Why did I have to be the responsible one? Why did I have to be the one to do all the right things and he go to do whatever he wanted? Did he even care about what happened to us?

I would wake later that night, just after midnight, my fire nothing but embers, fueled with new anger by my memory/dream. I looked in the driveway, to see it empty, no surprise, and simply went to bed.

The next morning, my sleeping husband would be lying next to me. I would get up, check on the kids and walk the dog. My husband was supposed to bring home some boxes for me to be able to pack up our few belongings, as his parents were moving in less than two weeks. I walked around the car, we had one of those old long panel station wagons. When I got to the end, I saw the rear window rolled all the way down and the back was empty, I sighed, because I knew what was next- some sort of story, a lie.

I went back to the house, woke the kids, fed them breakfast, and then sent them outside to play, putting the baby in the swing and then and went upstairs to wake their father. I kicked the end of the bed and yelled at him asking where were the boxes. When he didn’t respond, I hit his legs and asked louder, where are the boxes, cursing and using his name. He sat up mumbling and rubbing his eyes and said they were in the car. When I said they were not, mentioning I had been out with the dog. He then started to tell me about how many he had gotten and a couple we bigger and he had to put the rear window down so he could get them all to fit, and maybe some of the fell out. By this time I think I threw an extra pillow or something at him because I am so angry at him… why was he lying to me?

He just sat there staring at me, I was crying, I told him I was scared because his parents were leaving and I was worried where we would be living in two weeks and sometimes I even wondered if there really was a house. When I said that, his face changed and his eyes dropped away from mine. When he looked back up there where tears of his own and he was mumbling, but he said that there wasn’t a house, yet… but there might be. But we could rent a hotel room for a few weeks while he figures it out, while he keeps looking.

I LOST IT!!! I asked him if he really expected me to live in a hotel room with three little children all day long for even a week, let alone week to week… until he figured it out???

I told him I needed to check on the kids and suggested he go to a meeting, to talk to someone about his priorities. Before he left the house that morning, he must have said he was sorry at least a dozen times and told me that he loved me and the kids a dozen more. I know, I love you too, I told him, which I did, but the truth was I needed him to leave so I could call his parents – I had finally had enough.

So this extended entry has been cathartic as I uncovered one extremely concealed resentment, one so gracefully disguised for the past quarter century. There is a saying that if you tell a lie long enough (especially to yourself) you will begin to believe it. That is exactly what happened to me with my ex-husband, the father of my oldest three children. He was the love of my life, my soulmate, my best friend. I was so worried about my children having a negative memory in their minds when it came to their absent father, so I created this picture-perfect image. Always, saying “He was a good father, a good husband, a good man, the disease took him away from us.” Over and over and over, when people asked, that was my only response… rote, robotic, and in doing so, I forgot how it really was. I forgot how broken and ugly it was, how angry I was in the end.

The truth is our sweet little family was no longer sweet and life as I knew it had been shattered. That life would/will never be the same and it is time I put those memories away. The man I once loved more than anything, will always have a place in my heart, he gave me my children. But by getting stuck each fall, by living in that void, in that dark silent place; I was keeping myself from the beauty of the true sunlight of the spirit and all the beautiful songs that can be heard when we allow ourselves to be still and listen.