It Makes You Stronger, or so They Keep Telling Me

When I woke up the morning of March 28, 2018, I knew it was the day my life would irrevocably change.

I’d like to say that I was prepared for it, the discussion about the end of a marriage. I knew it was happening, but really, how much can you conceive of such an abrupt turn in a path you had long ago thought to be curvy, at most?

What I did not know, even as I drove to work after it all was laid bare, was that the day would hold an even more abrupt pivot — one that would slingshot me into a wall and then pull me like a rag doll back into another. Repeatedly. For months.

I like symmetry and anniversaries; if you’ve read much of my writing, you know that by now. I am a sucker for a full circle. What goes around, comes around.

And so today, I wonder at the layers of pain that all come together within the boundaries of this date, but spread ever outward, a universe of repercussions. Not all repercussions are bad, of course, but in the moments a solar revolution ago, it seemed like bad was all there was.

What doesn’t kill you, will make you stronger. I’m not dead yet, so I must be stronger. –The Nields

I struggle with not knowing. Anything, really. Not that I think I should know everything there is to know… but rather, that there are things that no amount of pondering, googling, or heavy research will ever teach me.

I will never know exactly what happened within my parents’ house that morning.

Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe knowing would make it harder. But as I stood in my bathroom this morning, I turned on the little heater I keep on the counter, and felt like I was being yanked back into the not-really-so-distant past.

Around the same time that I was having one of the most difficult conversations of my life, my dad was getting ready for his day. Did he have a headache? I imagine him standing in the kitchen, cup in hand, and taking some generic Naproxen Sodium, washed down with lemonade and a bite of chocolate.

I wonder what he thought the day held? A trip to Walmart? Maybe Lowe’s for some plants. At some point, he turned on his own bathroom space heater and let the room warm as he went to the computer to… what? It was NCAA time, was he on the basketball forums? Did he think he could fit in a few minutes of manuscript revisions on his latest novel? Maybe he was watching dog videos. Perhaps he was reading some early morning theology.

Still in his pajamas, the bathroom warmed, he got up. Did he get up to shower, or get up in sudden pain?

All we know is that he never made it out of the computer room.

Whenever I walk through that room while visiting my mom – not my parents, my mom – I want to kick things. Like I can somehow blame the four walls instead of… nothing. There’s nowhere to place the blame. I’m not religious, I can’t even rail at a god.

When a relationship ends by choice, there is plenty of blame to go around. Anger feels righteous, justified. Even if it’s misplaced, it has a target. When a relationship ends by sudden and unexpected death, there’s an absence of direction. You spin and spin looking for answers and somewhere to spit out the anger filling your throat, but all you get is dizzy.

I never expected to be a sample size of one, able to pull it apart and examine these differing vantage points. I jumped off one ledge, and was pushed off another.

Turns out, hitting the ground is always painful.

But, as my dad said many times throughout my life, “just rub some dirt in it and walk it off.”

So I walk. Dirty and scratched and – inexplicably to year-ago me – upright.

The obituary