I’m imagining myself teaching a class on grief.
“This,” I tell my young students, “is how you think your life will go.”
I draw a chalk line that wends gently upward in a steady, predictable run from childhood to old age. Education, school, work, adventures, love, purpose, a peaceful death in old age. No dust, no muss, an Instagram-perfect flow.
Then I glance sharply at these innocents with a look that says, Are you paying attention?
“But more likely than not,” I continue, “your life will go something like this … ”
The chalk screeches sharply up, then cuts a razor path down to the X-axis, rebounding in wildly erratic loops and culminating in a mad dash to death, all the way to the right. So frantic are my gestures that the chalk breaks, sending dusty fragments to the floor.
Those crazy swirls hold grief, universal but often unspoken. Yet it took the sudden exit of my husband of 30 years, starry-eyed over an old girlfriend, to realize its impact – and that I had no training in moving forward under the weight of it.
In my family, we simply buried grief. My mother was a soft-spoken librarian with a master’s degree, my father a career military man, a decorated veteran of 51 B-17 combat missions in the second world war. He was also an alcoholic who abused my mother relentlessly when he was home from overseas. I was the youngest of six, joining my siblings in 1959 at a rural home where terror was strangely normal.
My sister’s memory of her 1960s prom day: coming home from the hair salon, our mother behind the wheel, our drunken father shooting at the car. I remember lying in bed at night, covers pulled over my head, hearing my mother scream as she was chased and beaten. The evening of the 1969 moon landing, my mother and I fled in darkness to a friend’s apartment, staying overnight until my father’s rage subsided. Another night, my brothers Michael and Scott huddled in their bedroom after hearing gunshots inside the house, believing our mom had been killed, too scared to move. Michael recalls their relief at hearing her voice in the morning – she’s alive! – and his shock at seeing the holes in the ceiling.
After 30 years, and only after my father revealed he had a mistress in Japan, my mother found the courage to leave. I became a journalist and over the years interviewed many trauma survivors, including veterans. I saw how painful it was to pull on these strings of memory, so I understood why my mother never wanted to talk about the abuse, or Scott’s suicide at 22 after a breakup, or her grief around all of it.
When I interviewed her in her early 80s for a family project, she said, “I grew up believing family was everything, and you all went through hard times and you were supposed to stick it out.”
My childhood and the silence around our collective trauma did nothing to prepare me for marriage. I knew only that I wanted a safe harbor. Lacking a healthy model, my search parameters were “nice, doesn’t beat me”.
I had not screened for alcoholism. Ten years into my marriage, I issued an ultimatum and my husband, to his credit, quit drinking and begged me to stay. Keenly aware of my own shortcomings and our marital challenges, I still saw much to be grateful for. Like my mother, for better or worse, I had staying power.
In the fall of 2017, two days before a long-planned retirement trip marking my exit from the workforce, my husband announced he’d reconnected with a girlfriend from 30 years ago – a marriage counselor, no less. Thus at age 58, I became another dot in the exponential trend known as “gray divorce”, couples 50 and older ending their marriages. In 1990, 8.7% of divorces in the US were among that age group, according to the American Psychological Association; by 2019, the number had grown to 36%.
Gone was the main witness to more than half my life, the man with whom I’d raised three children, and in his place was a fierce pain. For months I couldn’t eat, sleep or speak without crying. My divorce lawyer, of course, had seen this all before. On our first call he listened attentively, then said, “He’s been done with you for some time.”
It was hard to accept.
Three years in, after therapy and medication, I was still struggling. Was it normal to feel this bad for so long? Then a tarot reader unaware of my breakup suggested I write a memoir “as a pathway to healing”.
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I started by doing what I knew best: interviewing people, strangers who had been dumped, about how they made it through.
Kris’s husband cheated with her best friend, a woman who feigned compassion for months as Kris shared angst about her failing marriage. Ian listed his “whole life” for sale on eBay after his wife left him for a man they met while shopping for their dream house. Wanda paid for her husband’s auto repair shop, which he turned into a secret love nest.
Those interviews provided a few useful tips but mostly made me feel less alone. These people understood how it felt to see life unravel, dreams dissolve. Yet each had moved on to new lives in which joy had made a comeback. You don’t get over the grief, they agreed. You move through it – and that can take years.
I finally saw that my healing was in progress, and decided to write about what helped and what didn’t as I stumbled toward a new life. I hadn’t read anything that offered the kind of encouragement I needed. The result is What to Do When You Get Dumped: A Guide to Unbreaking Your Heart, a graphic memoir created with my daughter Hallie, an artist who had to navigate her own grief over our family’s reconfiguration.
Our book, which is much funnier than this essay, chronicles what I learned pushing through loss.
I learned that transformation takes time, attention and patience. Counseling, medication and exercise helped end my depression. Family and friends brought comfort. Meditating, gardening and spending time alone helped me find peace and balance; so did reducing distractions like TV and social media, and distancing myself from people who added to the chaos.
The writing itself was also transformative. Examining these hard-to-face issues in depth made me realize that no one was coming to fix my pain. I was responsible for the next phase, free to rewrite my life’s script based on my abilities and values.
In this new life, grief has become integrated, somehow, informing how I move forward in the world. I try to give the present my full attention, working to create moments of joy and connection. Lately, that means lifting my grandchildren high in the air just to hear shrieks of laughter, marveling at the hope I have for this new generation to talk more, to seek help, to feel the whole messy business of life and learn from it.
Grief is part of life. It keeps its own schedule. Its lessons can help define our values, to see what truly matters and perhaps make different, better choices. Lifting the silence around grief meant I could find more compassion for myself, and the confidence to explore a healthy new relationship when that day comes.
I want that for everyone who is heartbroken. Because, class, whether we are lucky enough to find it or not, we are all worthy of lasting love.
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Suzy Hopkins is a former newspaper and magazine reporter and editor (and new grandmother) who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio
English (US)