It is early Sunday morning of the last weekend I will spend as a permanent resident of this old house. He is upstairs in the second bedroom, asleep under the same roof for the first time in six weeks, and I am here in the room we made into an office, reminding myself that a week from today I will be drinking my morning coffee somewhere else. It is hard.

When he arrives, we talk as much as raw emotion permits us, in the silences clinging tearfully to one another. He is exhausted from the long workdays in the city and bloated from the booze. For him, the consequences of his behavior have barely begun to set in. I, who have lived with the pain of it for weeks now, am heartsick, weary of the emotional suffering, steeling myself to move on.

We drive into town to buy food for an easy dinner, touching each other gently in a sad, non-sexual way. We eat pasta carbonara, one of his favourites, and spend a very quiet evening in front of the TV.  He has purchased a bottle of wine and it is just like old times, or so he is pretending. For me it is the last supper, the last evening of (almost) normalcy. The last of our days as a couple.

There are no words to describe the anguish of loving someone with all your heart and yet understanding beyond any doubt that you have to leave them behind you. It is hard when the thing that has ripped your life apart is not another woman, or a falling out of love, or a growing in other directions, or the dreaming of different dreams. When the thing is alcohol addiction and when it takes the other person, the other half of your soul, into that country of despair and self loathing over which he has no control, you are always collateral damage to the disease. Being hurt and sometimes forgotten in the miasma of his private descents into hell has been my fate once too often. I know when I have had enough. Now there is no choice but to move away, take refuge in a different life, begin anew.

Even as I hear my own heart breaking, this task will face me all too soon. In a matter of days, I will be gone. As daunting as it seems and as much as it may pain me,  this is not the time to waver. 

For both of us, it is the best and the only thing I can do.  

It turns out that the Internet is full of practical (and not so practical) suggestions for how to mend a broken heart. I know this because today I went looking for some of them for myself. 

Today would have been our wedding anniversary if the marriage hadn’t suddenly imploded last Saturday, leaving me with an unfortunate reservation for next weekend at a lovely B and B, a detached and distant spouse, an old house full of memories, and the aforesaid malfunctioning piece of the anatomy. In the age of technology, what else does one do but Google up some sensible advice?

The truth is that I myself am not without credentials in this particular field, and that I probably could have written some of the articles I have just read. That is because my very own heart was already badly broken nine years ago, just after the mid-point of my long journey with this same sweet, brilliant, funny man. It was broken so unexpectedly and so completely that it all but lay before me in shards, a pitiful thing so badly damaged that it seemed as though it could never be repaired. I remember telling my therapist at the time that I felt like a wounded animal, like a dog that had violently been  kicked.

Of all the many things going on back in those days, of the many separate threads that were woven into the tapestry of those events, the worst of it for me was to have had my world upended completely by the sudden (temporary, as it turned out) appearance of a cold, cruel stranger where my good and gentle husband used to be. Who was this man? Where did he come from? What had he done with my spouse?

No matter how hard I tried at the time,  no matter how much I read or how many questions I asked, that phenomenon was something I could not understand. What could have caused a person's character to alter so suddenly?  How could he, with such apparent indifference, inflict hard emotional pain on someone he was supposed to have loved so much?  Because I thought our crisis had been caused only by an infidelity, my own diagnosis at the time ran along the lines of guilt. The only thing I knew for certain was that I could never in life allow anything to hurt me that way again.

That time, very gradually, we glued my heart (and everything else in our world) back together. The cruel and distant stranger morphed back soon enough into the sweet and caring person I adored. With tender remorse, my husband would cradle those parts of me that were broken, and we suffered hand in hand through the anguished talks, the tearful recriminations, the confessions and accusations and the months of expensive therapy that evolved into the slow and steady rebuilding of a life. Gently and patiently we both worked hard to get past the raw emotion, and to built a new trust that we believed would endure forever. The willingness to walk together through the flames of that fire, we told one another, was the very definition of our deep, transcendent love.

No matter what has happened since, to this very moment I can’t regret our decision to make that choice.  In the end, what I learned about love during that most painful period of our existence is what has made it possible for my glued-back-together, aching, breaking heart to beat without shattering today.

Last weekend, while I was happily making anniversary plans and anticipating the arrival from the city of my sweetheart, that cold cruel stranger reappeared at the end of the telephone. This time, even though I recognized his voice (and could label the thing that called him back here) I recognized too that anything I might do or say would be to no avail. When the stranger comes, I am forgotten. I have been in this movie once before. A few hours later, with his final promise broken, the love of my life was lost to me for good.

Whether the kind and gentle man who used to be my soulmate can find the will to escape the power of his demons is not for me to say. As devoutly as I might wish it, I cannot make it so.

For me, there is nothing else but to fix my unfaltering gaze toward an alternate future and, with my love for him still beating in this full and fragile heart, somehow, somehow to survive.