Eighteen Easters ago my world changed forever. I've always loved Easter. As a little girl it meant an Easter dress, new shoes, white gloves. It meant Easter baskets and solid milk chocolate bunnies to be savored slowly, one little nibble at a time. It meant snow sometimes, but hearty crocus and snow drops peeping up from the faded green grass under the snow. Daffodils bravely waving their beautiful yellow faces at the mild sunlight. It meant church with my family, dinner with my maternal grandparents. As I grew to adulthood it meant family dinners here at my house, out of town family always coming for a feast; me loving to entertain and feed them all, Steve lording over it, enjoying my family as much as I did.
And then it changed. I do not celebrate Easter now. I have not cooked Easter dinner in the same way, and then, only rarely since. I love to paint Easter colors and Easter ceramics, but I don't celebrate it with any of the joy I had for the first 37 years of my life. Eighteen years ago my uncle died just before Easter. My cousin Ann flew down, and she and I drove her parents car back to New York. Aunt Betty and my other aunts and uncles flew. The funeral was sad, yet it was so good to be with the entire family. Steve could not attend; he had a job out of town and he could not take off. I understood. When I came home from New York, the next week was Easter. The aunts and uncles came back because they needed to close up their winter homes, so again, I planned Easter dinner here. Steve was still gone and we had not seen each other since before Uncle Polly's death, but we talked on the phone the Monday before Easter. He asked me to buy a certain printer for the house so he could fax time sheets, etc from home if need be. He was not available when I called after that and it did not raise an alarm in me until Friday, when I realized it had been a few days since we talked. My heart started working overtime; I knew something was wrong. His voice mail was full and would not receive more. A call to his company was fruitless, and even my call to them reminding them that he was in their truck and missing was not doing any good. It was a terrible time, not hearing from him. My father, who it turns out, was fairly certain Steve had cheated on me, drove to their hunting camp to confront the girl Steve had been with in New York - another fact I found out later. My father thought he may have been suicidal and had gone to the camp; he was not there. Chris called her husband; Steve's friend and co-worker, and he evaded her. Easter Sunday I bravely went through the motions of cooking. As my family began arriving, so did Chris. We went to the laundry room and she told me. She had threatened her husband until he told her the truth. She said Kim, he is not coming home. He has left you. He is with another woman out of state, in New Hampshire, meeting her family and celebrating with them.
My world collapsed. I remember falling to the floor. I remember her crouched over me. I don't remember too much else after that. My family left, dinner unfinished, untouched. I am sure someone put it away, but I lost the rest of the day. Chris left at some point and I died inside. I made it through the night and into the next day, and I remember sitting on the couch looking at the fireplace; the oyster bricks that we lovingly picked out together just three years earlier. I looked around me remembering every nail, every board, every brick; every moment of building our home together. I remember giggling was we spent clandestine time in the house as it was being built, making love in each room in the middle of construction. I remembered our plans, our lives, our happiness for all those years and all that we went through to get where we were. I remembered being at his mothers side when she died 10 months earlier. I remember discovering his father in his bed after he died in his sleep. I remembered losing our baby and discovering there would be no more. I remembered the sadness of that. But I remembered our laughter and our joy, so much more than all that sadness. I died a thousand deaths inside. I would not, could not accept that it was over that he had turned into someone who could or would injure someone, anyone, me, that way. Not the smiling, happy faced boy I fell in love with, the man who whistled as he worked in the yard, as he reorganized, as he planned, as we planned our future. It was devastating. He finally called Monday night, late into the night. He was at dinner with his new love, and he had stepped away to make the call to me. I was not allowed, in his eyes, to be angry. I just needed to face the fact that it was over and he was moving on. He never told me why, even all these years later. He never told me exactly why he became such a coward and why he could not tell me face to face that he wanted out. For 18 months he came and went, and I let him because it was so inexplicable, so unforeseen, just so random. He never told me, to this day even, that he was leaving. He just did it. He spent the holiday with his girlfriend; who eventually became his wife, and then his ex-wife. He spent the holiday pretending that he and I had been separated for over 6 months and that I was fragile, and crazy, not wanting a divorce and he was being kind and giving me time. I found all this later, and it still reads to me like something from a novel, not something that actually happened to me.
I have been doing a new writing exercise; 750words.com. I think the process of writing these daily words has been leading up to this. I have always realized, underneath all my pain, all my suffering, all my growing and healing that this is the novel I need to write. I need to write the novel of my life, beginning with that first magical summer of Us and ending where it did, as it did. As I have been writing the last 27 or 28 days, I have wondered where all this has been heading. I will have a record of how I need to write it, why, and it will remind me that life happens. That we learn, we love, we grow - we lose. That is the novel of life.
