I don't usually mention this, but some years ago, when I was in college, I was married. My first husband and I were married when I had one year remaining of college, and I had attended college early. We had a simple wedding at a beautiful old white church with red double doors, and then, we enjoyed a dinner with our friends at what is still one of my favorite restaurants, in that particular state. The restaurant and the hotel remain open and quite popular, even today. The day after the wedding, we looked for an apartment near enough to the college. We had planned that he would work, I would finish school, and then I would work, and then he would complete his own degree. Shortly after the wedding, we found a garden apartment with one bedroom. I still remember the oak floors, the brick construction, the tiled bathroom, the generous closets, and the gas stove and oven. It was a good rental value, even at that time. We started with minimal furniture, and didn't gather much more in the time that we lived there. I remember wallpapering a large mural of a life-like forest to one living room wall.
In our early twenties, most of us don't know ourselves particularly well, let alone another person. It didn't take a lot of time before we realized that we were very different people. He disliked that I couldn't travel when studying for exams, and I didn't understand why he wasn't as practical as I was. He wanted to buy a new car, while I wanted to start saving for a house. He wanted to go out to a restaurant most nights, while I wanted to figure out what I could cook that would be both inexpensive and tasty. I wanted him to complete his degree, and he wanted to continue working. We were pretty good friends, but we didn't have common goals.
It took a few years for us both to realize that although we were good friends and had commonalities, that our goals for the future were not the same, and that marrying had been a mistake. Neither of us found this very easy to admit, and so we saw a wonderful marriage counselor, at first with the objective of making our marriage healthier and stronger, and then eventually with the objective of figuring out how to let it go.
When we did decide to divorce, it was challenging. We both wanted an amicable divorce, and thought we could keep it non-adversarial, especially since there was little money between us, and because we both tried to give one another the few furnishings we'd managed to acquire, to that point. We would each keep the cars with which we had come in to the marriage. We hoped to use one attorney who would represent us both. There was no such thing as a "no fault divorce" in that state at the time, and so we were placed in the difficult position of one of us needing to sue the other for something. He eventually allowed me to sue him for abandonment. Of course, that meant that the divorce took a lot of time because he had to meet the statutory definition of abandonment. By then, I was making more money, and so I paid for the separation agreement and for the divorce itself. For the most part, it was amicable. We both believed that we had each made a mistake and that we truly had different goals and objectives. I remember that we tried hard not to blame one another.
In the years which followed, he moved out of state. I eventually moved also, and married someone whose goals were more in alignment with mine. I have never really discussed the things which caused us to end my first marriage because more than anything else, I believe you owe the person you are or were married to, silence with particular regard to your difficulties or the other person's shortcomings. I really did hope that he would find someone to whom he was better suited, as I had. In the years which followed, as my present husband and I raised our family, my first husband and I lost touch. At some point, we stopped sending Christmas cards. I no longer had his address, and surprisingly, he wasn't active on social media. In the years in which I raised children, I rarely thought of him.
This week I learned that he has died. I am stunned. He was too young to have died, and I have no idea what happened. His parents are dead, and there is no one to ask. None of my friends still knew him. I am not grief stricken, but I am shocked. No, I think the word is gobsmacked. How could someone I was once married to, be dead ? Death wasn't supposed to happen to either of us for thirty or more years.
I don't need to cry, but I am not sure how to move forward, either. All of a sudden the one remaining piece of antique furniture he gave me, and the one antique lamp and rocking chair have become very precious to me. I didn't mean to divorce him and then never exchange as much as a Christmas card again. I hoped he would marry again, and although I know he dated a college professor for some years, he never did. Now, there is no one on Earth but me who knows of those early days in the apartment with our friends from college, and funny friends from the garden apartments. When we could, we went to New York, to museums, and fairly often to Montreal. Those days weren't a hundred percent bad. They simply should have been a dear friendship, rather than a marriage. I'm sorry for anything I did, knowingly or unknowingly that hurt him and perhaps made him choose never to marry again. At this moment I can't shake that perhaps I am in part responsible for his not marrying again. I hope the remainder of his life was good. I am..........sorry.
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