April 5, 2016: It’s early and the moon waits just above the horizon line, a thin, creamy

left-handed ‘C’. There is an old barn on the rise across the field accompanied by a stand

of three fat pine trees. The sun is just about to come up. This is the day my marriage will

end.

______________________________________

 

It’s been a little over a week since Easter. And little over a week since I buried my keys

to the house on 503 E. Vine Street along with my wedding rings. For months I’ve known

I needed to do this. I carried my keys to Papua New Guinea and then to South Africa. I

wore one of my rings until October. I had driven to Woodland Hills church in Minnesota

to attend an “Everyday Peacemaking Conference” and somehow after that felt it was

time to take it off. I cried for hours on the way home, tried to hide my left hand when I

went in to pay for gas or get coffee. I felt so angry, so ashamed, so naked. I begged

God to redeem my hand, to somehow make it mine again. It still feels strange to not

have a wedding ring on my left hand.

 

Good Friday I was sitting in my church listening to the story of what happened so many

years ago in Jerusalem and I knew it had to happen on Resurrection Day. I had to find a

spot in the woods, dig a hole, and bury them. My mom was here on the farm with me for

Easter and everyone else was with family so we rose early on Sunday morning and fed

and watered the pigs, the chicks, the hens, and the rabbits. We went to church. I was

present but anxious, anxious to get home to the farm, grab my shovel, and head out into

the trees. I knew about where I wanted to bury them, but wandered a bit until I found a

huge flat rock.

 

Like everything else that has happened during this long year of grieving my marriage I

was somehow prepared by the time I got there. I wondered if I would be prostrated on

the forest floor unable to do what I came to do, but a sweet calmness was present with

me. I dug a deep hole and sat down on the rock.

 

I moved deliberately and hesitantly through a ritual I hope never to repeat. I read

scripture. I prayed. I begged for freedom from the sadness. I asked for hope. I asked for

permission to somehow, truly move forward . . . on with my life. All things I’ve prayed

before and probably will pray for again.

A friend sent me this poem a few months ago in response to an agonized text I sent him

about how slowly I feel like I am mending.

 

Least Action

By Kay Ryan

Is it vision
or the lack
that brings me
back to the principle
of least action,
by which in one
branch of rabbinical
thought the world
might become the
Kingdom of Peace not
through the tumult
and destruction necessary
for a New Start but
by adjusting little parts
a little bit — turning
a cup a quarter inch
or scooting up a bench.
It imagines an
incremental resurrection,
a radiant body
puzzled out through
tinkering with the fit
of what’s available.
As though what is is
right already but
askew. It is tempting
for any person who would
like to love what she
can do.

 

Life doesn’t seem to grant new beginnings, not really. What happens is actually always

incremental. We can violently end things like a marriage, but I don’t believe we can

actually have the new starts we think we want. All the things we refuse to deal with

when we cut situations or people out of our lives without looking them in the face are

still there, like ticks attached to places we can’t see, sucking the life out of us and

probably filling us with poison.

 

I finally dropped the keys in and then my rings and filled the hole. I poured water on it,

perhaps baptizing my longings, perhaps watering my grief, hopeful that it will produce

something beautiful. My last act was to scatter dead leaves over the fresh soil to cover

the raw earth and to throw a handful of them in the air in celebration of a freedom I don’t

yet have.

______________________________________

I got up at 5:15 that morning, April 5, 2016. I went into the seedling room and turned on

the lights and watered everything. It is so bizarre that life keeps going in the midst of

incredible pain. I have spent hundreds of hours crying this year, prostrate on the floor,

sleepless nights, so much anger, so much confusion. But these tomatoes keep growing,

keep needing water and fish emulsion . . .

 

I got coffee. Spent some time deciding what to wear. Stared into space. Tried not to

think. I prayed and wrote about four sentences in my journal. Doug knocked on my door

at 7:00 a.m. and offered to start my car. Katie came downstairs and hugged me. Molly

came up with Annabel and we headed to the vehicles. I could have ridden with Doug

and Molly but I needed to be alone. I listened to music all the way to Mount Vernon,

mostly a song by Gungor called “Beautiful Things.” It’s worth listening to on repeat for

nearly an hour, loud.

 

I had received instructions from his lawyer on where to go once we got to the

courthouse. It all felt strange, passing through security, turning over my cell phone,

walking up the stairs, waiting with a young pregnant woman who was hoping the baby’s

father would be granted bail that day.

 

After waiting about a half hour we were ushered into a conference room. My counselor

and another good friend arrived—people I had asked to be present to witness this thing

that was happening to me, to us. Then Andrew and his lawyer arrived. Awkward words

were exchanged between the lawyer and me. Andrew finally sat on a bench against the

wall cattycorner from me and fixed his eyes on his hands where they pretty much

stayed. We all waited in that room for over an hour while we waited for the courtroom to

be free.

 

It is now June and I still don’t know how to finish this. I cannot and maybe should not

describe what those hours felt like. I could tell you that I sat in a courtroom and watched

my husband cry as he choked out the words that ended our marriage. I could tell you

that I walked out into the hallway, hugged my counselor, Kyle, hugged my friend, John,

and then looked into Andrew’s eyes and said, “I forgive you.” I could say that he cried

and said, “I forgive you, too.” But somehow none of that matters. I mean, it matters, but

nothing changed. He still turned and walked away, his black North Face jacket encasing

shoulders and a heart that finally . . . after all said, “No.”

 

This isn’t the way this should have ended . . . but it has and somehow I have to keep

waking up every morning.

 

I have never worked in a place where I could spend half a day turning nearly a ton of

manure, alone, while the rain is pouring down outside. I have never worked in a place

where I could just cry, snot pouring out of my nose. I let it come. The hens don’t care.

They scratch excitedly as I uncover the odd bug. The barn cat meows for attention and

Peanut, the resident Guinea, squawks his oddly pitched squawk to warn the barn of . .

.  something.

 

_____________________________________

It is nearly officially summer and the garden is growing. Finn and I picked a couple

pounds of sugar snap peas today. The tomatoes are blooming and the potatoes are

healthy. Life inches forward, healing is coming, I think.

I’ve thought a lot about the dark this year, about how to Be inside of it.

 

Go outside tonight. Don’t turn on any lights. Sit in the dark. Let it actually touch you,

make you sad, scare you. This is some of what I have learned this year. To sit in my

pain. To cry when the tears come. To ask for help when I need it and I do, often. To

scream in a friend’s ear over the phone. To run these country roads at night, feeling a

grief so deep that I can only describe its physical symptoms, sobs that would sound like

a dying rhinoceros to anyone listening.

I am learning to let God look at me—just look. To sit in the dark and wait like a celery

seed, tiny and fragile, for heat to reach me, stretching up through the soil for light.

Life might just be possible. I hope so, anyway.

 

Here is to incremental resurrections!