That was the river. This is the sea.

I was listening to this song by The Waterboys the other day and it brought back a sharp memory of the night I left my marriage. It was a Monday evening, and I had walked out of my house with my daughter and a bag of clothes. After dropping her at her best friend’s, which was where she wanted to be, I drove east with the idea of staying in a hotel somewhere. There were numerous doorsteps I knew I could show up on, but I wanted anonymity.

I pulled over on the Miracle Mile in San Rafael and used my phone to book myself a room in the Embassy Suites, a suitably huge and faceless place where I knew I would meet only strangers. Then I drove out to China Camp state park. It was a warm September night, the moon and the stars were out, and this song came on as I pulled off by the side of the road overlooking the marshland and the East Bay’s lights. Now I can see you wavering as you try to decide, you’ve got a war in your head and it’s tearing you up inside...but that was the river, this is the sea...

I got out of the car and I stood looking up at the night sky - Hamlet’s brave o’erhanging firmament, fretted with golden fire. The phrase howling at the moon comes to mind. But instead of howling, I remember that I shouted something out loud to the stars. It would be impossible to describe how I felt at that moment, because it was not one emotion but a whole mess of them. Then I got back in the car and drove to Embassy Suites, where I walked across the giant empty atrium with my single bag, and the smiling receptionist said cheerily, hi there, how has your day been?

My room was enormous, a suite really. A suite for one. I put my bag in the corner of the bedroom, and my toothbrush in the glass in the bathroom and I looked out my third storey window to the parking lot below. I called two close friends, and then I lay down on the bed and wondered when I would ever feel normal again, and what that new normal would be like.

That was the river, and this is the sea...

The metaphor is an apt one. Marriage feels to me a little like a river, with its tug and flow and the familiar banks keeping the water in check. Sure, there are dangers lurking: the odd rapid, sometimes a series of them; periodic threat of river eels or snakes or something uneasily unpleasant just below the surface. But you move along with a river, in the one direction, with a general purpose and the sense of a beginning a middle and an end.

When you leave, you cast yourself into the ocean. It’s vast and uncharted, unfamiliar, fraught with the fear of going under. Everything you knew is back there on the shore. There are waves and storms and frightening creatures of the deep and you have no sense of direction as you flounder around. In the beginning, you are consumed with the effort not to drown.

Leaving a long marriage is a kind of death. You lose so much, and you go through the same phases of grief as when someone dies: shock, pain, guilt, and on and on. And yet, in my experience, there is a prevalent sense in our society that if you chose to leave your marriage, and especially if you are clearly happier since you left, you must be doing just fine. 

When a death happens, people come around. They bring food. There’s a memorial, a way to come together and grieve and remember. There are no markers in our culture for divorce. One day you serve papers. One day you sign the marriage settlement agreement. One day the court-stamped paperwork shows up in your mailbox and your marriage is officially over. I picked mine up on the way to work one day, thirteen months after I left. I drove around seeing patients all day with that manila envelope on my passenger seat.

The night I walked out of my house, I lost my life partner and all our plans and hopes and dreams for the future. I lost my intact family, my house, my pets, most of my possessions, and my neighborhood community. I lost any sense of security. Over time, I also lost some friends. Couples, mostly. People I thought were close friends. The best I can understand it is that for some couples, hanging around with a newly single person is uncomfortable. And all that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what my daughter lost.

Did I choose to lose all those things? Nobody chooses the pain of divorce. They just choose the lesser of two kinds of pain.

Over time, a new Waterboys song became more relevant to me: I shed some light, I change my address, I haven’t felt this great since I first went West. I’ve got brilliant intentions, unthinkable plans, I’ve got sparks and electric shocks just exploding from my hands.

It’s a song called Learning to Fly, and it’s about a guy who is falling in love all over again. Okay, so I’m not a guy, and I’m not falling anywhere. But it was a new metaphor. I’ve always fancied flying and I thought maybe I had spent enough time in the water. And when Mike Scott would sing I’m gonna love you as hard as I can, and I’m never gonna stop, I would think how that might be true for me again some day, and in the meantime, why not lay a little love on myself?