It would seem that a new life can come at a person from any direction, even from an old one. With the gentle rain falling outside my window, I am looking forward to an indulgent day of reading, curled up on one of my pretty new love seats, with an old cat purring on my lap.

When I moved away from the farm last fall, it was only partly because the addictions experts advised me to do so. The theory was that by leaving my husband with the house and the wealth of responsibility that went with it, I could help him appreciate the consequences of his alcoholism and addictions and encourage him to get help. With my love and support, they told me, he was more likely to come to grips with his multiple problems and be able to lead a clean, sober, happier life. In the end, by his own choice, what has transpired with him had almost nothing to do with me. 

My own private reason for moving out was that I’d seen it all before and didn’t want to become a statistic. When a marriage ends or is in trouble, it is somehow always the wife who gets left with the detritus, seemingly destined  to rattle around in the matrimonial home, with the kids (in our case many animals), the old furniture, the wedding gifts and all those memories of things past. It is almost a given that the husband will move on pretty effortlessly to a brand new and uncomplicated life with someone else.

So it was that I wanted to break the mould; and I was fortunate enough to have friends who made it possible for that new and uncomplicated life to belong to me. Although there was no someone else on the scene, everything was different from the existence I'd had here on the farm.

With my ex in residence on the homestead, I lived nearer town, on a river, in a modern cottage with all the amenities. I sipped wine with friends in the evenings on a deck and I slept in a beautiful loft. Although I missed them terribly, I had no farm animals to feed, almost no lawns to mow, no cares whatsoever except to heal and try somehow to find a path of my own. I indulged myself in long bubble baths in the whirlpool tub, with a book and a glass of chilled white wine in my hand. For the first time in years I had soft, uncallused feet. I lunched, did volunteer work, walked by the water, took up my camera again. I spent most weekends entertaining house guests, dining out, or visiting friends in lovely parts of the province I hadn’t seen in years. Slowly, with time,  I felt my single spirit coming back to life.

So it’s funny now to be back here in the country, especially on my own. True to every one of the cliches, my ex husband lost no time in establishing that proverbial new life anyway. Blithely, without a backward glance, he eschewed the important first year of solo recovery to replace me with a woman younger than I am and nowhere near as well educated or as bright. Because she is living near Chester, that’s the only place on earth he wants to be. By the late spring, like our marriage, the farm and everything on it had faded easily into his "then" while, in the ensuing chain of events, inching its way gradually back into my "now." I am so grateful that it did.

In the end I have come to be the one in residence here, returning at first temporarily to care for my critters, and then of my own volition, to the place I once so fervently intended to leave behind - to the unkempt acreage and the aging animals and the dear, decrepit old farmhouse whose charm I fell in love with all those many years ago.

Thanks to the long months I spent on my own elsewhere, I have learned that our happiness lies not in our geography but in our selves; and that just because the standard scenario usually plays out, doesn’t mean it is always a bad one or that it won't be fulfilling for me.

I am sitting in my bedroom back at the farm, a place I’d resolved never again to be. It is really only from this place that I can write this blog, because it’s hard to seek a life of the mind while living a practical life on the farm if you aren’t actually living on a farm.

Until last month, when to my great surprise I returned here for good, I lived on the LaHave River in an exquisite small cottage owned by two of my dearest friends. How and why I came back here is a story for another time. 

My marriage is completely over and has been for a long time. This time, no attempt was even made to save it. Although my ex husband and I are cordial, we have not really managed to remain friends. He has no idea how to do so, and I am far less invested in this notion than I was when we separated all those months ago. It was the romantic in me, I suppose.

Sadly, right after his return from a residential treatment programme in the Valley, he began a sexual relationship with a woman in his recovery group, thereby foreclosing on his chances of becoming self-sufficient and creating an immediate new set of co-dependencies with her. He is now deeply enmeshed. Although he appears to be clean and sober, his complicated interior problems have obviously not been resolved and this makes the chances of relapse far greater in the long run. As unfortunate as this may be, it is the path he has chosen to follow. With all the challenges that lie before him, I wish him nothing but the best.

In the year that has passed, I’ve had a great deal of growing to do on my own behalf. I’ve worked with a good therapist, had the help of an incredible support group, and benefitted greatly from the emotional and practical generosity of my friends. Slowly I have found my way back to reconnecting with the woman I once was and the woman I want still to be - free spirit, idealist, adventuress, dreamer and warrior in the cause of creating a better world.

Without the constraints of the film business to circumscribe my leisure, the enormous beauty of the Nova Scotia summer has made itself once again wonderfully apparent to me. And then there is the companionship of my girlfriends - kindred spirits encountered anew and woven, this time forever, into the fabric of my life. I am a lucky woman and I know it.

So from this place that was once our home and where I’ve begun to make a life on my own, I plan to live in nature, care for the animals, work, love, dream and, in countless other ways, live out my story. To make this my own sanctuary, a cocoon of serenity and comfort, a haven for friends, I began by painting the kitchen and living room pink. May the warm glow cast by these pretty walls envelop all who come here and invest this lovely old house with renewed life.

There are times when it is appropriate to describe life and other times when it is better just to live it. It is now the last day of what, for me anyway, was an incredibly difficult year. In my own experience 2010 marked many months of living alone as a “film widow,” the passing of several much loved animals, the implosion of a lengthy marriage, and the beginning of another life in a lovely borrowed cottage on the banks of the La Have River.

In the four months that have ensued since my last post, the “sturm und drang” that heralded my leaving home have morphed into something else as my husband and I have both had time to process the events of the late summer.  Over time the iciness between us has melted and by now we have grown close again, sometimes even able to really talk.

As I write this, he has been sober for three months, is undergoing counselling, and has become a faithful attendee of AA, an organization for which he has nothing but gratitude and respect. A week from now, by his own choice,  he will enter a residential rehabilitation programme to continue his brave attempts to explore and conquer the underlying problems that have tormented him for years. I will live here at the farm to care for the animals, but only while he is away. 

After a slow year, the legal research through which I make my living experienced a sudden resurgence in the fall and I have been far too busy to spend too much time looking backward. I love the tranquility and beauty of the cottage and the ability to control my own existence. At the same time, I can’t stop myself from missing my home.  

I have come back for the Christmas holidays, partly to allow my kind and generous friends to inhabit their own space and partly, truth be told, to see what is left of the life and love I left behind. This has been incredibly bitter-sweet. Especially here, with the animals and the rituals of Christmas still in place, there is a real battle waging between what I “know” in my head and what I feel in my heart.

This fall I joined the wonderful group of people who run the Lunenburg County Film Series and have volunteered to Habitat for Humanity, who are gearing up to start a new built in the new year.  I have read countless books, taken advantage of the free month subscription to Netflix and joined the occasional ranks of the ladies who lunch. Although I’ve been clear headed and perfectly functional, the emotional pain, anger and frustration that derive from years in an alcohol marriage linger inside me and still get in my way. I too have much internal work to do.

Tonight, in this place, with the man who is still my husband beside me, I will observe again the ritual to which we have held for two decades ; we will dine on cheese fondue and Caesar salad, sit by the fire and watch Casablanca, and toast the incoming year, this time with sparkling de-alcoholized wine.

With the next chapter far from written and the words just beginning to flow, there are only two things I know for sure.  The first is that, even if we can’t rescue the marriage, we will never stop loving one another. The second is that, whatever is to come, that future can only define itself  slowly. 

It will happen  “one day at a time.”

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.  

There’s no way around the fact that the death of a relationship is a painful thing. Although this time I seem  to be all right on my own, the last time my heart got broken, one of the ways I coped was by seeing a therapist whose first question every session was invariably about whether or not I had cried. 

Shell-shocked as I was by the suddenness of the events that had taken place, somehow no tears would ever come. That time, I was too emotionally traumatized to do much more than stare vacantly at the walls. Although I found this line of therapeutic inquiry to be odd, almost invasive, I understand now that crying (or psychogenic lachrymation as it is technically called) is beneficial for the release of emotional distress, and can even bring comfort to a wounded soul.

Today,  in this period of time immediately following the final breakdown of my marriage, life has been just what one would expect it to be - a proverbial roller coaster ride of  pent-up emotion written large. I cannot even bring myself to think of finding new homes for my beloved animals. That particular deep and searing pain,  I must leave for a future time.

As the days have rolled themselves one into another, I have passed many times in and out of the inertia of shock, enduring the betrayal of my body, the sleeplessness, the loss of appetite, the painful flow of memory through the mind. And always I am dry eyed. With my eyes closed in the pre-dawn hours, I listen through my iPod to the calming voice of Jon Kabat-Zinn as he reminds me that there is peace in the simple awareness of the breath. Breathing mindfully at all hours of the day and night, I walk, sometimes for miles. 

These days, I wake up every morning and tell myself to put one foot in front of the other. I compel myself to stick to a routine. I keep occupied and I accept every social invitation that comes my way. I make lists and put things in boxes, force myself to listen to the soundtrack he lovingly compiled for our wedding, lay my head on his crumpled pillow to inhale the fading scent of his skin. I gaze with newly saddened eyes at the home we created together - my Colette novels, his espresso maker, the folk art animals we purchased before we had any of our own. It is the home where our hearts once beat in unison, the home I will be leaving very soon. 

This afternoon, when it begins to rain torrentially, I am reminded anew of the therapist’s  persistent question and the metaphor of the heavens is not to be lost on me.

In the daylight, in my sorrow, I curl myself into a ball and lay on the soft green ground beneath the bursting clouds, allowing them to flood me with their tears. Soaked to the skin when I finally rise again, I have managed to produce a torrent of my own. 

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.