By Kathryn Jenkins
I’m still not sure how it happened. It seemed like one minute I was on the steps of the Salt Lake Temple, hand in hand with my eternal sweetheart, beaming for the camera and fashioning in my mind all the dreams that would carry us through our life together — and, the next minute, I was sitting in the lobby of my divorce attorney’s office, dabbing blankly at tears that wouldn’t stop.
But there were many, many minutes in between — twenty-six years worth of them, to be exact. Many of them were breathtakingly wonderful, including the experiences that surrounded the adoption of our five children. Some of them were gut-wrenchingly difficult, like the suicide of our seventeen-year-old son or the revelation that my husband was using drugs. Most of them, though, were blissfully ordinary, and I thought they would last forever.
They didn’t.
Just two weeks after my fiftieth birthday, my husband — that once-bright-eyed young man who had clasped my hand so tightly on the steps of the Salt Lake Temple — walked away from our marriage. It was the Saturday of April General Conference, and I had just gotten into the car to go to my friend’s house, where a group of us would scrapbook while we watched conference on TV. It was our tradition.
The day was bright, and sunshine warmed the rich soil of the flowerbeds along the front of our house. Crocus had pushed tenaciously through the surface, followed by early tulips and the hint of hyacinths. We had spent a leisurely morning, making plans for the rest of the weekend. I had just finished a diabetes management class at the hospital, and was optimistic about the changes I was making. We discussed the dinner menu for Sunday — I wanted it to be special, because it was my mother’s wedding anniversary. More than forty years after my father’s death, it was still a tender date for her.
As I turned the key in the ignition, my husband moved quickly around the front of the car and scrambled into the passenger’s seat. “We need to talk,” he said. I still can’t remember exactly what words he used or how he strung them together. I do remember that he told me he was leaving. Go, he said — go work on scrapbooks at Jackie’s house. I want to be the one to tell your mom and the kids. I’ll be gone by the time you get home.
The rest is a blur.
I drove the twenty miles to Jackie’s house, screaming all the way. I somehow stumbled through her front door and told my startled friends that my marriage had ended. I remember being hoarse, my voice a raspy staccato in the crisp morning air. They stayed in the living room, awkwardly watching conference and trying to pretend nothing was wrong, while I holed up in the bedroom.
I called my best friend, Marilyn. I called a handful of other people in the neighborhood. I called my visiting teacher, then my home teacher. I called the bishop.
And then, more suddenly than I would have expected, I died inside.
He lied. He wasn’t gone by the time I got home that night. In fact, he had procrastinated telling our children. As I came through the front door, I heard muffled sobs from downstairs — and unabashed wailing from behind the closed door of our youngest daughter’s room. My oldest son paced in aimless circles in the driveway. And my husband, his own eyes red and swollen, darted up and down the stairs, loading the last of his things in the back of his truck.
I stood in the driveway, as if planting myself firmly on the concrete could prevent his leaving. I don’t remember what I said to him, though I am sure it was disconnected and anguished. I don’t remember what he said back, though I am fairly certain it was cold.
And then he backed out and pulled away from our cul-de-sac.
I crawled into bed, though the hour was still early. It seemed to be the only thing that made sense. I lay, trembling, staring across the expanse of the king-sized mattress. Suddenly, it seemed massive. I prayed, pulling the quilts up around my chin and drawing my knees to my chest. I wept bitterly, the agonizing tears soaking my pillow.
I called out to Cameron, my son who had committed suicide just a year earlier. Waves of first anxiety, then fear, then utter betrayal washed over me and threatened to drown me. Between sobs, I gasped frantically for air.
After what seemed like hours of anguished grief, I glanced at the clock. It was not even close to midnight. I feared I would not survive until morning.
It started again — the tormented weeping, the uncertain grief. I must have made more noise than I ever imagined, because at one point my sixteen-year-old son crept through the darkness and climbed cautiously into bed beside me. He gathered me up in his strong arms and took a deep breath.
“Don’t cry, Mom,” he started, feeling for perhaps the first time his chance to be my comforter. “Dad may have left, but you are not alone. You are worthy. You still have your sacred covenants. You have Heavenly Father, and He loves you. Dad leaving will never change that.”
It was the first of many words of humble advice and comfort I would receive during the months ahead. Many of them, like those first ones, came from sources I would never have expected.
Later that night — much later, in fact — I picked up a small paperback book and started to read. I can’t remember what the story was about, but it helped to distract me. Every once in a while I put it down and shifted positions in the bed, plumping the pillows. During those brief connections with reality, there were no thoughts that maybe things would work out — that maybe my husband would come back. I knew, even then, that our marriage was over. Hopelessly, forever over.
Meticulous Plan
The next morning, as word of his leaving spread up and down the street in our neighborhood like ripples from a stone breaking the surface of a pond, the facts came trickling in. I heard witnesses to his infidelity. I heard accounts of his iniquity. I learned of bold lies and unfettered examples of betrayal. Perhaps most disturbing, I found out that he had planned this for years. He had established a step-by-step checklist of how to prepare for his life without us, and he had carefully and surreptitiously checked off each item. The day he left — a little earlier than he had actually planned — he had only a few loose ends to tie up.
For him, his exit seemed smooth and uncomplicated.
For me, it was incredibly coarse and terribly convoluted.
For him, it seemed casual. He had thought about it and turned it over in his mind every day for at least five years. He was used to the idea; it was almost second nature.
For me, it was brand new.
I was baffled. Why hadn’t anyone told me?
I remember sitting on the couch in my living room across from my mother, trying to make sense of it all. It was her anniversary — the day I had wanted to make so special for her. Instead, I could barely function. I think I looked fairly normal on the surface, but I remember trembling inside so violently that it was difficult to speak. My heart raced. My stomach churned. My mind jumped from one place to another in no rational order.
I remember wandering downstairs to listen to conference — and my heart breaking as I heard Elder F. Burton Howard describe his wife’s tender care of their silverware, pieces saved for and purchased one at a time through the early, financially sparse years of their marriage. I remember him describing how she guarded and protected that silverware — even putting it in a safe deposit box while they served a mission.
“For years I thought she was just a little bit eccentric,” he concluded, “and then one day I realized that she had known for a long time something that I was just beginning to understand. If you want something to last forever, you treat it differently. You shield it and protect it. You never abuse it. You don’t expose it to the elements. You don’t make it common or ordinary. If it ever becomes tarnished, you lovingly polish it until it gleams like new. It becomes special because you have made it so, and it grows more beautiful and precious as time goes by.” It should be that way, he said, with our eternal marriages.
Eternal marriage. I used to have one of those. But I didn’t any more.
His remarks came at the end of the Sunday afternoon session. I sat curled up in the recliner in the family room, sobbing. I didn’t care who heard; I was desperate to try anything to relieve the pain. My mother — whose day I had planned to be so special — mobilized my children and scurried around the kitchen, fixing dinner for me.
It was supposed to be the other way around.
Somehow, I got through that day. And the next day. And the one after that. And all the ones since then.
One at a Time
I won’t lie: some were much worse than others. Some were glorious. Most were somewhere in between. I learned that I had to get through them one at a time. There was no secret pill, no magic bullet. There was no other way to get through — I had to do it just one agonizing day at a time.
Little by little, the pain that so tenaciously attached itself to my love for my ex-husband diminished — as did the love itself. I learned with stunning reality that it’s not easy to suddenly stop loving someone. Not nearly as easy or as rapid as falling in love is. I learned that falling in love is as easy as falling off a log — and that falling out of love is more akin to being dragged through a vast field of ferociously thorny brush. But I did eventually reach the other end of that field. And by the time I reached the other side, I was not nearly as wounded as I had expected to be.
Friends who have never divorced—some of whom have not yet married—have asked me how it feels.
I guess there are as many answers to that as there are divorces.
A Sea of Aloneness
For me, I felt as though I had lost my anchor. My mooring was gone. I was adrift in a sea that was not often calm. The water was so cold it chilled my bones. The waves were unpredictable and not infrequently frightening. The random creatures that brushed up against me in the murky waters were often menacing.
I was exhausted from frenetically paddling my arms and legs in an effort to stay afloat in an area where I could feel even a little bit safe. I could have relaxed — could have assumed the limp position of the dead man’s float — but then the tides could have pulled me into places where I faced dangers I could not handle. No, I had to keep paddling. No matter how exhausted I was.
I felt cut loose. Treacherously bobbing around in a great sea, surrounded by impossibly deep water but parched to my very core. I yearned to find another anchor — a great, solid anchor that would tether me to safety and provide me stability. I knew I had a divine heavenly anchor. And as precious as that knowledge was to me, sometimes it just wasn’t enough. Sometimes I felt that I needed more. Something tangible. Something I could touch.
Most difficult for me was that I felt all alone in that vast sea. As far as my eye could see, there was not another soul. For the first time in my life, I felt profoundly alone. I felt small — almost indistinguishable in the vast, dark sea — and frightened.
If I concentrated — if I focused with all my might — I could sometimes make out the blurred outline of the distant horizon. It seemed shrouded in a heavy fog, far out of my reach. Far out of any remotely possible grasp. Even so, I tried desperately to stay always where I could see it: tried never to get pulled so far or with such intensity that I lost sight of that horizon, because I knew it was where I wanted to be. And somehow, I knew that, against all odds, I would eventually be able to get there again.
Pretending Normalcy
For me, that sense of being alone was the most difficult part of my divorce. In the first surreal days after my husband left our marriage, I desperately tried to avoid being alone. When there were other people around me — colleagues bantering in the hallway at work, kids arguing over who got to choose what to watch on television, my son-in-law drifting through the kitchen to microwave a bag of popcorn, friends wandering over to see what I was dredging out of the garden — I didn’t have to think about what had happened.
I could pretend, if only to myself, that things were normal.
But in those quiet, cavernous moments alone, the stark reality always set in. Things were not okay. They were not normal (though I have since come to challenge that there is such a thing as “normal”). And they were definitely not as they had always been.
During those times, when I was forced to see my situation for what it was, I somehow found it less threatening to focus on the nuts-and-bolts, temporal side of things. I had no lawnmower; who would mow my grass? My husband had left the weed trimmer, but I didn’t have a clue how it worked. Was the sturdy orange line supposed to be unraveling? What about my swamp cooler? I had never succeeded in climbing higher than the second step of a ladder — let alone onto the roof. Besides, I didn’t know what to do when I got up there. Besides even more, there was no longer a ladder.
My daughter had accidentally pulled off the front of the silverware drawer; now the drawer was jammed. What could I do about that? The refrigerator’s filter light was on — there’s a filter in there? What happens when the garage door opener stops working? What if the hornets burrow in under the front steps again and build another nest? How on earth could a shrub die so quickly? And why is the dryer making that horrible noise?
All of those things were overwhelming — but not nearly as overwhelming as the real issues, the things I couldn’t bear to contemplate at the time.
When I felt threatened — by actual events or by nothing more than the underpinnings of my own imagination — I no longer had someone to retreat behind, someone to protect me and keep me safe. Instead, I had to dig deep within myself for the courage to look bigger and more menacing than I actually was, kind of like the posture the park rangers told us to use when confronted by a bear.
When something difficult happened with one of the kids — like the early spring afternoon when, at the fringe of a vacant lot, Cameron hanged himself from a tree, its bare branches scratching the gray sky — I no longer had someone else who could square up his shoulders and help to take the pain away.
Two by Two
By its very nature, marriage is a pairing. Two become one. You begin to see the world through another person’s eyes, to walk along the path of mortality in another person’s shoes. That other soul becomes the focus of your existence, and you face whatever life has to offer together.
I will never forget the advice given us that crisp October morning when we knelt across the altar from each other in the Salt Lake Temple. The officiator who performed our sealing pointed out that it’s relatively easy to snap a stick in half. But, he said, gather a bunch of sticks together in a tight bundle, and try to break those in half. It’s not nearly as easy. In fact, it can be impossible. It’s like that with you, he said, gesturing to the two of us: singly, separate, it can be easy to break you. But together, bound in a tight bundle, you have strength that defies anyone’s ability to harm or destroy you.
With that sealing ceremony, we would be bound tightly together. Where one was weak, the other was strong; when one fell down, the other could offer the needed power and support. And in an ideal marriage, that’s exactly how it works. It worked that way for a number of years in my own marriage, so I am familiar with the concept and the comfort it provides.
One of the most difficult things for me about my divorce was losing that strength — being cast out of a safe, secure, cohesive bundle and strewn carelessly to the side, so alone and brittle that I knew I could easily break. It was scary, especially at first. I was accustomed to having the sanctuary of that companionship. I was used to being able to rely on someone else who, in turn, relied on me. I was used to facing challenges as a team, and used to celebrating victories together.
When I was little, I felt safe because I knew my mother was sleeping just down the hall, only a cry away. When I was married, I felt that same sense of safety when I would awaken in the night, shrouded in darkness, and move my foot ever so slightly to feel the warmth of his foot under the same patchwork quilt.
I missed that. I missed it tremendously during difficult times, but I missed it at completely unexpected times, too — sitting on the porch at dusk and surveying the pots I had just planted with dozens of moss roses, anticipating their blooms of color. Listening to a favorite song as I drove through the foothills behind Alpine, where we had once dreamed of living. Wheeling the grocery cart through the produce department and seeing a pomegranate the size of a softball, garnet red and leathery to the touch. Clamoring into the teetering boat and tucking my granddaughter beside me for a spin through “It’s a Small World,” her chubby finger pointing to the topiary lion that stood guard over us. Savoring the juicy sweetness of the season’s first raspberries, so plump I could hold only a few in my hand.
Those were bittersweet moments — moments filled with joy and even delight, but infused with the sadness that comes from feeling somehow incomplete. I yearned for him beside me — to exclaim over the moss roses, to dream once again about the foothills behind Alpine, to nestle with as we broke open the juicy pomegranate, to beam over Brooklyn on her first ride at Disneyland, to gather those first raspberries as a sign of his love for me. But during the moments that yearning sapped the strength from my heart, I realized it was also sapping the joy from otherwise sublime experiences. And when that realization came, with it occurred a curious insight: was it somehow possible that those moments could still be sublime, even without him?
Reclaiming the Sublime
You know the answer, and so did I. I knew it all along, but it was buried beneath layers and layers of sorrow and betrayal and disappointment and uncertainty, waiting for me to discover it. It was possible. My life could still brim over with moments so sweet I could scarcely contain them, even though I was no longer paired or coupled.
Some of those moments were shared, but with someone else. I learned that moss roses were one of my neighbor’s favorite flowers, and later that summer the two of us spent a couple of leisurely hours in the shade on the porch, nursing glasses of lemonade, as we marveled over how profusely they had overtaken the pots. My daughter loves pomegranates, too, and we shared not only the ruby seeds, but delighted in the shared search to find the plumpest and heaviest one. And if it were possible, Brooklyn’s own mamma — my older daughter — took even greater delight in her first trip to Disneyland than I did.
I found out, too — much to my astonishment — that some of those moments could be enjoyed, even savored, alone. Long drives through the foothills behind Alpine provided the quiet and solitude that allowed me to commune with my Heavenly Father in ways that were possible only away from the hustle of my ordinary days. Alone, I could go at my own pace — could stop and walk through a small meadow of wildflowers or sit on a flattened boulder at the edge of the road and watch the sun dip below the horizon. There was no one urging me to hurry — telling me he had to get home or reminding me of a more pressing duty. There was just me, the incredible beauty of nature, and the One who had created us both.
The raspberries were still sweet, still juicy — even though I was alone. A sweetheart had not handed them to me, newly gleaned from the stand of bushes along the edge of his father’s backyard. No, I had gleaned them myself, gently coaxing one at a time from the splay of branches that spread into my own backyard from the bushes Marilyn so carefully tended. They were warmed by the sun and some of the fattest ones I had ever seen. As I savored them — again, one at a time — I had the luxury of sitting still in the quiet of the late afternoon, remembering why they were my favorite food.
Different Treasures
Many of the moments I had treasured with him were now different, but they were still treasures. That, more than anything else, surprised me: that life could still be so utterly sweet, so worth the pursuit, even if I was not half of a whole. I could be the whole — all of it — and could still find delight and satisfaction and fulfillment in what each day offered me.
Do I still miss the sweet companionship of marriage? Of course. There is nothing that quite compares, nothing that quite takes its place. The relationships I enjoy with my mother, my children, my grandchildren, my friends offer some of life’s greatest rewards, but they do not substitute for the oneness and singular kind of love reserved for a spouse.
But in the shadowed moments when I feel that less-frequent sadness beginning to creep in at the fringes of my awareness, I remind myself that my life is filled with so much, and that it is still there for me to enjoy.
Do I still miss knowing that someone is always there for me? Yes. I probably always will. What utter peace of mind knowing that whatever happens, there is another half waiting to absorb what I can’t — that together, we can face anything. Trying to make myself look taller, bigger, more menacing only goes so far. But in those moments when I feel scared or incapable or overwhelmed, I remind myself that I will never be given more than I can handle, and that the handling itself is incomparable preparation for the ultimate reward.
Do I still miss moving my foot ever so slightly to feel the warmth of his under the patchwork quilt? Absolutely. I probably always will. There is safety in numbers — strength in a bundle of sticks as compared to the brittle fragility of the one tossed out on its own. But in the quiet of the house in the middle of the night, as I strain to hear the comfort of familiar noises, I remember that I am never really alone. I may not be able to feel the warmth of a foot under the patchwork quilt, but I can feel the warmth of the Spirit all around me, protecting me in a way that no mortal ever could.
As I look ahead to the days and weeks and months — and, yes, maybe even years — that I might be alone, I take particular comfort in knowing that truth: I am never alone. I am being watched over and cared for by legions on the other side of the veil, led by the Savior of mankind, One I have been privileged to come to know in a whole new way since the day my husband walked out of my life.
He is there for me, as He is for all of us. As President Gordon B. Hinckley reminds us:
