Seasons Change

Yesterday was my 27^th wedding anniversary. I almost feel hypocritical. It seems as though one of the qualifying criteria for being a divorce attorney should be having gone through a couple really nasty divorces. But, here I am married to the same man for twenty seven years—in a row. I make that last comment only because some people marry, divorce, and then marry the first guy all over again.

My marriage to Cecil started out with the usual star struck romance. Those early days gave way to life's routines, which brought us depth and complexity that wove our lives together more deeply. Years passed and we matured and felt nicely settled. Then we got side-swiped and everything kind of went into the crapper. The flush lever loomed ominously, but we resisted. So now, another ten years down the road, I’m taking stock.

What I see is a couple that has spent ten years trying to survive. Trying to survive is different than living, and it is a far cry from actively loving someone. You try to avoid the life in prison thing at all costs, and it’s no picnic fighting off cancer. Financial devastation has a way of making life unpleasant and a stem cell transplant just lays itself all over everything. 

Then the storm comes and knocks out the power for a week and tumbles huge trees across the yard. It never fails that, right on the heels of all that, you’ll spring a steam leak that ruins the paint job in the living room. To top it all off, the fish in your pond start dying for no apparent reason. And, it goes without saying that, if you happen to be a writer facing deadlines of any sort, they are always there to nag at you.

Where’s the time to tend to niceties?

So, I woke up yesterday, said Happy Anniversary to Cecil, and started in on my To-Do list. I hadn’t even gotten him a card. Maybe we’d go out to dinner later, but that didn’t happen because we got busy with the day. He showed me up with a card and flowers, but he picked them up at the grocery store that afternoon when he was there shopping. Later we argued a little because we don’t seem to appreciate each other anymore. I think it’s him and he thinks it’s me. Of course, it’s both of us.

I thought about our talk and realized how hard it is to make a marriage something you are happy to be in. For me, it’s a long-term commitment that rests on family and partnership. It’s easy, though, to slip into the business of raising a family and partnering through life. The thing that makes a marriage unique is the love and companionship and mutual support that flood in early on and so often dissipate over time.

When events and circumstances threaten to overwhelm, I fall into ‘getting the job done’ mode. Even as I write this now, I am feeling anxious because it’s already Sunday and I have so much left to do before I go back to work tomorrow. I have to confess that I succumb to stress occasionally and indulge myself in the tiniest bit of bitchiness. A little of that goes a long way.

The delicate layers of a relationship need nurturing. We all know this, but often refuse ourselves the temptation to take care of this most important part of being with someone. When we let it slide too much for too long, we wake up one day and there isn’t enough left to sustain the marriage.

As I closed up the house last night, the air was cool and crisp. Just like that, fall had snuck through the woods and slipped in around us. The season has changed. I take it as a reminder that life does not remain constant; it evolves from one moment to the next. This is a gift to each of us that we can make of what we will.

So, today, I am going out to get Cecil an anniversary card. I will tell him how much I appreciate him, how grateful I am to have shared my life with him, and how much I love him. Better a day late than not at all.

Spheres of Reality

I spent last weekend in Charlottesville with Cecil, then came home Sunday night for a few days’ work. At 5:30 Monday morning, a text called out from my nightstand: he’d fallen; plunging blood pressure; fever spike; hallucinations. They were transferring him to the ICU.

Hallucinations? I’ve been prepared for any number of calamities throughout the stem cell transplant process. We’ve already been visited by many of them, but hallucinations were not on the list.

I jumped from bed, maybe brushed my teeth…not sure…then threw the dogs into the car. The sun came up as I sat outside the kennel, waiting for it to open, so I could board the pups. The poor girl who arrived tried to comfort me as I conducted business through a stream of tears that fell, unblotted and unexplained.

 Racing up the highway, I prepared myself for what was waiting. Maybe he would die today. Maybe the graft had failed and he would fade away gradually. Maybe he’d stroked out and would never be the same. When I got there, I found a man I didn’t recognize. There were many things going on, but the hallucinations have stayed with me most of all.

He spoke more like a child than anything else. The trashcan was stalking him, but cleverly jumped back into place when I stood up to catch it in the act. We peeked under his covers to look at the potatoes he had gathered there, and the hand that was arranging them. Billy Bob Thornton pulled up a chair alongside of his bed to sing to him. And, of course, the wallpaper was waving (in 3-D), there were insects crawling on body parts, and squirrels were plunging to their death off high-rises out the window.

Reality snuck in around the corners from time to time. “I think I’m seeing things that aren’t really there,” he said once, just as his eyes darted off to follow the glitter that was raining down upon a stack of Ziplocs that were mobilizing in the street below.

I didn’t know what to make of all this. Cecil is a highly educated man: an engineer; a physician. Suddenly, he was talking nonsense. His reality at the time was a place I couldn’t get to. We were in different spheres, like two planets orbiting independently of each other. Meaningful communication was not an option. It reminded me of when we were fending off the feds.

Nothing they were doing made sense. Cecil was the kindest, most dedicated doctor a person could hope to have. His population of pain patients was among the most difficult to treat, but he never gave up on any of them. Yet, the feds pounced on him like he was some drug dealer barely in disguise. They had to know Cecil was a good man and a wonderful doctor. That information was all around them. It just didn’t seem to matter. They were committed to a reality that, for us, didn’t exist.

Cecil’s legal team was ready to defend his medical decisions. It turned out though, the feds had a different theory of the case. They put on evidence that was so far afield of the allegations it was almost laughable – except it wasn’t. The jury was presented stories of dead squirrels, Beetle and Bailey living in the basement, prescriptions exchanged for nasty old wine racks, and pot billowing from bongs all day every day in front of, and with, patients. They attacked Cecil for being eccentric. They made fun of his eclectic office décor, and they had a field day with a ‘coffee stained patient list’ they’d found in his truck during the first of their raids. The lead prosecutor flashed Cecil’s driver’s license picture on a theater-size screen throughout the trial. It had been taken on a bad hair day.  

In looking back, the whole case seems now like a grotesque hallucination. It was as far-fetched as the potatoes under Cecil’s sheet, or the trashcan that was stalking him. If you look around, though, these kinds of disconnects are everywhere. One doesn’t have to have IV drugs running through his body, or be an ambitious prosecutor serving a political agenda, to see things that aren’t there.

Every day in my law practice, I hear stories of people talking at each other without being heard. I have a case now in which neither party can see the spouse’s point of view, no matter how legitimate it might be. She is an evil bitch, that’s all there is to it. He is a domineering bully who draws the line at nothing, for no apparent reason. Each comment is taken as menacing, and neither party is above bending or stretching words or intonations to mean something they likely never did. I spent fifteen minutes with a client last week debating the significance of where the spouse had placed a comma in an email.

It’s easy to take up position and miss the things that don’t mesh with your sense of reality. When Cecil and I have arguments, the only ones that end well are the ones that find one of us willing to let go of our self-conviction. When I make my point from every conceivable angle, without considering what he is saying, the only movement in the conversation is in the volume and the level of sarcasm. If I find it within myself to stop and listen, and admit when he is right, the whole dynamic changes. Suddenly, we are laughing at ourselves. We become friends and lovers again, instead of antagonists bent on toppling each other. Our realities come together rather than collide.

Reality can be distorted by perception or context as it moves among us. It is upon common ground that we can communicate and mean something to each other.

On the way from the hospital to the cottage the other day, I stopped at a light. Two young men were sitting on the curb, each with a bottle of liquor in hand. They were both clearly well on their way to wherever the bottle would take them.

One spoke loudly in a string of vernacular and epithets, gesturing wildly as he berated the other. “How dare you, M…F… place your hand on my body,” he screamed. “You had no right to lay your hand on my body when you spoke to me, you son-of-a-bitch. I don’t put my hand on you when I talk, you M..F..ing bastard.”  He ranted and he raved, unfazed by the other man’s disinterest. The second man was not available…his headphones and sunglasses had taken him elsewhere. Undaunted by his friend firing off next to him, the second man swayed to music, tapped his feet and smiled to himself. The two sat together, joined in separation from most of the rest of us, but isolated from each other in what looked like a Woody Allen mockery of communication.

It takes work and effort to reach people. The challenge is to see the issue or the situation from someone else’s perspective, and then be willing to move toward it. I can forgive the guy who finds himself lost in hallucinations. I have come to dismiss the individual who cannot see that others likely have valid points to make. If you’re going to be so self-absorbed as to listen only to yourself, you might as well be a blithering outcast sitting on the curb, or the guy next to him in headphones.

Delicate Beauty

The last twenty-four hours have been long. A stem cell transplant travels an unpredictable course but, once you commit to it, there is no turning back. The ‘easy’ days of chemo and radiation are behind us. We’ve now entered the infection, rejection and graft versus host stage; we hope to avoid them all, but must be prepared for any one of them.

 Yesterday, infection made an appearance: high fever, weakness, the shakes. The medical team took more blood cultures to find out what kind of infection has set in. Meanwhile, monitor alarms cried out all night, nurses came running. More bags hung; more vitals taken; more meds loaded into the lines. Cecil is on triple antibiotics and we now ready ourselves for the scary part of the journey.

It’s been a long time since I’ve taken things for granted. I used to accept the gifts of love and happiness, freedom and good health, as if they would always be here. I know now how easily they can slip away. I am saddened to think of the days I would move like the wind through my daily business – assuming, without thinking it, that my tomorrows and somedays would be endless.

When the feds came knocking to take my husband away forever, then when death stood in line behind them, I started to look at things differently.  

So, now, when he asks me to bring him something from across the room, I run to get it instead of snotting off with, “Do I look like Stepin Fetchit to you?” As he fights to stay alive in his hospital bed, I stop and smell his dirty clothes rather than toss them with emphasis into his hamper.  

Needless to say, I am ruminating a lot about the notion of marriage. How many people do you run across with whom you would plan a lifetime? Someone who will hold your hair back while you toss your cookies into the toilet, and love you no matter how bad you look or how wretched you smell. This is a person whose absence makes the bed feel empty, and without whom all the money in the world would be pointless. 

Now, here I am, all full-up with an appreciation for the beauty of marriage, and I must leave my husband’s bedside and go to work where I swim in the blood bath of marriages that have failed. I am a divorce attorney. It sounds so scheister-ish. Though I don’t cheat and lie and steal, it is my job to make the other guy look bad. So, that’s what I do: she’s a stinko mother; he’s a control freak, and he lies. It’s a dirty business. 

To get where I need to go with a case, I must become my client’s best friend and, I dare say, the devil incarnate to the other party. I usually don’t care about that second part because, before we’re done, I most often see the opposing party as someone who will stoop as low as need be, and say whatever sounds good, to get what he or she wants. It is a Me, Myself, and I experience through and through.  

As we work a contested divorce case, I need to know about their finances, their flaws, their sex lives. Once we cross those hurdles, the details come more easily. I hear about the small things that make a marriage go bad: He doesn’t listen. She gets sarcastic when they fight; he walks away. She always wants everything her way. One of them is a neatnik, the other a slob. One likes to save money, the other spends it like there will always be more where that came from.  

I read their emails and their text messages to each other, words and feelings flung into cyberspace, missing the point, flaming the cinders that linger angrily, waiting to burst into raging flames that cannot be contained.  

When the gloves come off, there is no end to what we might expect. A sign in my office says “It’s not who you marry that counts, it’s who you divorce.” If only the lying and the greediness were as bad as it gets.  

Once committed to the process, most divorce litigants can justify almost any kind of conduct. My personal favorite is when they pretend to be afraid for their safety and take out a protective order to get the spouse out of the home. 

It’s all so sad, and so destructive. These people once loved each other enough to bring themselves to the edge of a future that waited for them. Somewhere, somehow, they turned…away from, and then against, each other. I can’t help but think it would have been less painful if one of them had become less controlling, less messy, more understanding of quirks, or more respectful of the differences between people. Had they looked into their partner’s eyes and seen the kindness, the humanness, the vulnerability…maybe they would have found a way to appreciate what it was that brought them together in the first place.

Instead, a disturbing number of disengaged, or disenchanted, spouses go looking for a ‘bull dog’ attorney, and set in motion a process they will learn to hate long before it has ended. If only they could appreciate the destruction brought about by the “I’ll see you in court” approach before they marched so defiantly into it. This process tends to bring out the worst in even the best of them.  

So much so that, when I take in a new client, I try very hard to weed out those with the ‘all for me’ attitude. I like to represent the good guy. I’m sure other attorneys say the same thing, but, I swear, they would have to be delusional to actually believe they got the clean end of the stick in some of these cases.

The other afternoon I was driving along a back country road. The sun was low in the sky. Its warm slivers cut in and out through the trees as I passed, striking my face again and again. This was not the sort of sunlight in which to bask and drift off. There was an energy to it that made me sit up and take notice.

I started thinking about my cases – so many of them; so many marriages that don’t make it. What happens? My marriage has been through several of the challenges that make it onto the list of things most likely to cause divorce, but Cecil and I have grown stronger together. We found a way to make it through the storm without jumping ship.  

He whispered in the darkness late last night “Will you cuddle me, I can’t stop shaking.” As I crawled in and wrapped myself around him, I understood the meaning of For Better and For Worse.