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.