Later, this guy will ask to video chat with me after I return from Duke, to talk to me about my experience there, and I will, even though I am high on opiates and weighted down by the steel pipe that is my spine, filled with blood clotting along my dura. “I hope this is it for you,” he will tell me, “I really hope you’re healed. And if you are—man, just run away from this group, from all these groups, and don’t look back.” I think he means to convey some kind of message of empowerment, like, If you’re better, stay better, and don’t dwell on the past once you’re headache-free; but still, it sounds ominous. I understand his longing to not have to identify as a sick person, as a person belonging to a group of sick people. And I understand how these things work: The people who heal, who recover, eventually leave; the people who are struggling stay. Sometimes people who recover end up relapsing and return to the group. Sometimes people who are recovered find it hard to leave the community that’s been such a part of their lives for so long, and become mentors and cheerleaders of a sort, posting hopeful messages, providing support. But after going through this by myself for so long, this community feels like a balm to me, not a conflict, not a burden. Not someplace to flee.
Just after I get the call from Dr. Kranz, about a week or so after I join the group, I get a letter in the mail, a thick envelope from the City of Philadelphia. I know what it is before I open it, but it’s still a shock. My divorce is final: These are the papers making it official. I text Gil to let him know that it’s here—he was sent his own copy, at my address, formerly our address—and he comes over to get it.
“This is it?” he says, and I say, “This is it.” We both hold our separate copies of the divorce decree, standing in the foyer as the kids sit in the other room, doing homework, listening to music. Neither of us is sure what to do—what’s the protocol, after all, for the official ending of a twenty-year marriage, the transition from life partners to co-parents?
“Well, congrats, I guess,” I say, and we both kind of laugh, and then we hug each other, tearfully. This is the right decision, we have both agreed. But still it has been a hard decision. It feels bittersweet to suddenly, officially, be on the other side of this process.
“Congrats,” he says, before leaving.
Within weeks, I will be removed from our health insurance, just in time for my trip to Duke.
25
There is more space when it’s just us, the three of us, me and Emi and Nate. Gone are the piles of mail and unread medical journals, the boxes of papers, the hoard of things to be organized, the task of organizing them put off and put off until finally the hoard is just a hoard, a series of towering piles inside a room that used to be a bedroom but now is a holding place for this stuff that hasn’t been looked at for years. Now that room is a bedroom again, now the piles and files and papers and boxes and clothes and the unfiltered history of a life has been transported to a new house, a new place for it all to take root, to vine, the pruning of which is no longer my problem.
The day he moved out, I’d wrapped myself in layers of compression—bike shorts over bike shorts over Spanx—to force my cerebrospinal fluid upward, giving me buoyancy, and I’d walked to a store to buy curtains for the living room. It seemed, to my half-functioning brain, the right thing to do. I needed to absent myself from the scene at the house, the movers and his parents there physically dismantling the proof of our cohabitation, the literal removal of him from our shared space. I needed air, I needed space as the emptiness of the house slowly revealed itself, as his parents quailed with emotion I wasn’t up to the task of managing, as he and I gamely agreed upon last-minute questions of ownership over small items we hadn’t considered until now, when we were faced with the prospect of losing them.
We’d lived in the house for seven years by that point, and we still didn’t have curtains in the living room. It’s true that the light was nice, that it was pleasing to have the sun streaming through on bright days, that even when it was overcast the room was filled with light, that that side of the house faces a narrow street not much larger than an alleyway, with no neighbor windows looking into ours. But the real reason we’d never gotten curtains was that he’d wanted to be a part of the process of choosing them, and he’d never had time. I’d bought some once, just simple, inexpensive things, just to have them, just to try, but he’d vetoed them; he wanted to choose them together, and we would do that someday, when he had time. But he never had time. For seven years.
I walked to the store, walked away from the process taking place of our house becoming my house, and felt my head throbbing with every step. I said curtains to myself, over and over, so I wouldn’t forget my mission, and then I was there, in the store, surrounded by all kinds of pleasing furniture, all arranged with no piles of mail on the tables, or clothes on the floor, or papers covering every available surface. There was no realistic tableaux of how a busy person might actually use these furnishings, and I realized that was because this was aspirational, a showroom floor, a kind of lie about real life; and yet I
