Ending Well

© 2010, Revs. Barbara Hamilton-Holway and Chris Holton Jablonski

Chris: I remember when they finally asked me to sit down in the pit and have a talk. It was a very seventies construction, a three foot deep indentation in the floor of our family room which was carpeted with the same orange shag carpet which covered the whole room and it was filled with pillows.

I don’t remember exactly the words they used but my parents explained that they were going to get divorced. It made sense. They seemed like they hadn’t been happy for quite some time. They had been sleeping in different parts of the house for a while, and something was definitely up.

They offered to have me go talk to someone, but by that point I knew all the right things to say. I said I knew it would be better for everyone in the long haul. I said that I knew that they loved me, that I knew that it wasn’t about me, that it wasn’t my fault, that I was going to be ok, that I didn’t need to talk to anyone about it. I was wrong.

Barbara: My parents were married for nearly sixty years. Sometimes when my parents’ relationship didn’t seem happy, I wondered if they should divorce. Since I hadn’t known the pain of divorce, I looked at divorce as more of a possibility.

You never know when, in the best interests of life, another couple should stay together or separate.

I didn’t even know in my own marriage.

When my marriage to Randy was ending, the only way I knew how to deal with it was stretched out over time. We separated. Then we may have taken nearly as many years to get divorced as we were married.

It was a painful and confusing time. I was naïve about the ebbs and flows of life and of love. I didn’t know much about navigating relationship. We appeared to be the "perfect" family. So, not only was it confusing for us, but confusing for our family and friends when our lives grew apart, when our visions for the future diverged.

I didn’t want to have to keep trying to explain our decision to everybody. I knew that our divorce would be hard for my parents. I felt I was really letting them down. I didn’t know if I could take care of their feelings and my own. We had friends with children who had imagined we’d all be family friends forever. Our divorce altered their hopes and dreams. And it was hard to figure out how to do all this.

People, who offered support, even when they didn’t fully understand, saved me.

I remember the night telling our young children. Ben was just in kindergarten. He said, “Oh, I know all about that. I have friends who go to one parent’s home on one night, the other’s the next. His older sister Sarah cried and cried.

A couple of years later when Sarah, Ben, and I moved to a different city, Sarah seemed able to adjust to this further separation from her dad. Ben was really hurting.

I remember Ben’s teacher showing me his drawing of a pair of pants torn in two.

I’m so sorry I was the cause of all this pain and sadness.

Chris: I remember the night I realized that it was over. I sleep really well usually. It is a bit of an event when I have any idea or consciousness about waiting to fall asleep. But that night, when I knew that my marriage to Sofia, my first wife, was going to end in divorce, I wailed. I went to sleep in the guest room and cried harder than I ever have. It was such a deep, desperate pain that initial realization. All the old stuff came flooding into me about my parents’ divorce, about failing at this holy task of love, such deep held pain came rushing through me and I just wailed.

That first night was just the beginning of a long process which eventually ended well. Our separation was decided officially with a week long retreat which spanned from Christmas to New Years Day. We went to a cabin in the woods and had nothing more to do than to sit back and reflect on each twist and turn, on our friendship, on our marriage, on our love. We talked about mistakes we each had made, we looked forward to what we both wanted in the future, and we realized together, that we both wanted to divorce and to move forward into the rest of our lives.

We celebrated the people we had become together, the path we had shared, and knew that this was best. It still hurt, it was still difficult, even good endings are still hard, but it was right.

Barbara: For me letting go hadn’t been easy.

When I graduated from college, I joined the Peace Corps. As I was getting ready to leave the country, I was seeing friends, but rather than say “Goodbye,” I’d say “I’ll see you again before I go.” When I left it was like sneaking out the back door.

Some of those friends I’ve never seen again.

When Randy and I parted, we didn’t really ritualize our goodbye in any way. He helped load the car, and he hugged Sarah, Ben, and me goodbye. Then three of us drove out of the driveway while he stood and waved.

Since then I’ve had more practice with good-byes.

Rather than ducking out the back door, I’ve had good-bye rituals.

When I was moving from one home in one city to a new home in another, my friend dug up a plant from the yard where I had been living so I could take it to plant in my new yard.

When Bill and I moved from Salt Lake City to Berkeley, we were leaving a family home where Sarah and Ben had grown up. The four of us walked through each room of the house, sharing memories. Bill and I were leaving Sarah and Ben who were staying on in Utah. We all stood outside the house in a huddle, crying. The four of us would never live together again. By the next summer Sarah and Ben were both living here. Still a time of our lives ended that day in Salt Lake City, and we marked it well.

When my ministry ended with a congregation I loved, we said good-bye in Sunday services, naming the mixture of feelings, remembering good times and hard ones, forgiving each other for the ways we had let each other down. We expressed gratitude and wished each other well. We said good-bye with laughter and tears and released each other for next chapters of our lives.

It’s hard to make a good ending with divorce. The feelings are so complex and painful.

Sometimes one partner is totally shocked, didn’t see the end coming. How did this happen? What were the signs? What did I do? Or not do? What can I learn? How can I move on?

Divorce can be nasty. A friend and his wife had hardly anything, and they fought over a pillow. Couples can accuse, verbally abuse and threaten one another.

Divorce can be wounding. It’s hard to begin a new chapter of life when you are barely able to stand.

We feel like we can barely function and yet amazingly we do.

As a community, we can support one another.

One might think it should be good news to let go of something that’s not working, not bringing happiness and love. There is good news, but still deciding to divorce triggers terror.

What are the deeper fears?

fear of being judged by yourself and others as having failed at a central life opportunity; fear of being forever lonely; of devastating our children; fear of being unable to love and be loved; of not being able to keep commitments, of breaking sacred vows and promises; fear of abandonment; fear of making a terrible mistake that if only we stayed faithful a little longer, we wouldn’t make; and ultimately fear of dying. Something is dying. All the endings prepare us for the ending of our life. Endings help us learn to live.

We all have had bad endings.

May we forgive ourselves and forgive those who hurt us. We can’t change the past. We can learn and now make better choices.

A good guide, a marriage counselor, is needed. Marriage counselors help sustain a marriage and when that’s not possible, they help make a good ending. Couples can name their regrets and failures, forgive each other, honor what was good and what they’ve learned and release each other to go on with their lives.

Good endings make good beginnings.

Chris: Good endings can help avoid making the same mistakes twice. There seems to be some kind of relational entropy which dictates that we will keep recreating the same dynamics, keep reliving the same stories with different players until we learn the lessons before us. Being true and honest, being whole and complete with our friends, with our families, with our beloved is hard work.

It is so much easier to shrink away from the work of loving, to unconsciously repeat patterns of dysfunction and imbalance in our relationships, to do what is comfortable and known, to stay stuck.

That night as the first painful realization of my approaching divorce with Sofia hit me, only part of my sadness was about what was actually happening right then and there. I was also catapulted back to that pit in my fourteenth year when my parents finally put words to the truth we had all known.

In the coming weeks and months I had to almost physically shake myself out of the body memory of that time and ground myself again in what was truly happening. I knew that this was different, that I had a chance here to write a different ending, to hold my history and experience, and not to repeat it.

Together in that open exploration and reflection on our relationship, in the loving regard we held one another in then and hold one another in still, whole new worlds of loving were opened as possibilities.

My commitment to and my practice of my marriage with Lauren is nourished and made stronger by all the work Sofia and I put into our ending.

It was far from perfect, and I made a number of mistakes, but I learned so much about what I want from life and how I want to live.

My mother, who is very happy in her second marriage, refers to my step-father’s two previous wives as training wives.

And it is funny, but it is also true.

We are here to learn and grow, to be set free by our living.

When we seek to be real, to be true with ourselves and one another, this will bring us into tight places, hard places.

Some of us will come to painful crossroads with our families, needing to have hard conversations, name long unspoken truths which might forever fracture our relationships and connectedness.

Some of us will need to intervene with friends who are spiraling out of control with destructive behaviors, need to speak hard truths and love tough.

And some of us will come to the brink in our marriages and partnerships. We might find ourselves in frightening territory.

And it is our prayer for all of you that you may move bravely and honestly into these moments, that you open to them and do the heroic and difficult work of learning.

That you have faith and persevere through the hard parts.

That you know that, in the words of David Foster Wallace, “the truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you.”

May we all be mindful in our loving,

Barbara: May we forgive ourselves and forgive one another.

Chris: May we honor and own all we have been given as legacy, both skillful and not so skillful.

Barbara: May we practice compassion for ourselves and others, especially those with whom we share so intimately our lives.

Chris: May we build relationships of authenticity and wholeness.

Barbara: And may we take the time to tend to our relationships so we may know true, deep and full love.