Now that you're gone...

My heart is breaking for my BFF, who also happens to be my niece. I think about her still as the young, vibrant, voluptuous, tough as nails woman who played volleyball, basketball, and swam a mean butterfly on our high school swim team. My mind goes back and forth often as I can still picture her in her aerodynamic swim suit as she is powering through a 100 m butterfly race or as she is setting a ball with her beautiful hands for the spiker to slam it down on our opposing team.

Then I see her as the mother she has become to four gorgeous grown children, the grandmother she is to four sweet grandbabies. It is hard to believe that we are that old, that time has passed so quickly it seems. In my mind’s eye I still see us both as girls, tittering away the nights on the phone. Talking together during and after practice, or our way to college together, as we talk about our hopes, our dreams, our plans, and our latest crush.

Flashbacks are usually kinder and gentler ways of remembering about the journey along the way that has brought us here to who we have become. The reality of what our life is now is sometimes not so kind and gentle. For my favorite niece life resembles a nightmare right now and that is why my heart hurts for her. Her marriage of over 25 years is ending, her husband has been served.

On my reservations sometimes when people are in a relationship for years their names become synonymous with one another’s and in some cases their identities become so entwined in one another that it changes their name. There is a woman who to this day I still think of as “Pat-Mike”, people refer to her that way often, yet she has not been “Pat-Mike” since two marriages and over 50 years ago. She has now been widowed twice. My own brother’s wife is referred to as “Khrissy-Duck “because his name is Donald and they have been married for over twenty years.

Tess never became “Tessy-Joe” but it their names were always intertwined, if I heard mention of one I would always think of the other as well. They had been together since we were in high school. He was the love of her life. But time has a way of changing people as they grow older their emotions change, their beliefs, and sometimes their love slips away, dissipates, loses its hold on them.

I’ve heard it said that one can easily walk away from the man who has done one wrong, it isn’t easy and definitely not a pain free process. It is the marriage that is harder to end. A marriage that at one time meant everything to that young, beautiful couple in love. As time erodes that love and erases that commitment to one another it ends the credence in the marriage itself. It is only when the credibility and confidence in the nuptials are gone that the acceptance hits. The knowledge that it is over can be like an epiphany or like a death. It all depends on how you see it and in what direction you want your life to move.

I went through a divorce myself quite a while ago. It hurt down to my core, I felt I was to blame I was the failure, because that is what he wanted me to believe. Instead I took that time of loss and grief and used it as a jumping off point to a better me, a stronger smarter me. I hope for you that you can do the same.

We may never pass this way again

Like the twilight in the road up ahead
They don't see just where we're goin'
And all the secrets in the universe
Whisper in our ears
All the years that come and go
Take us up, always up

{Refrain}
We may never pass this way again (4x)