Separation Anxiety

by Laura Zigman

Life is like that. It’s a series of advancements and regressions, the same tide, coming and going, giving and taking away.

This is who I am now in middle age—lost and confused and shifting constantly between my own world and the real world. If the dog is helping me survive these dark days, then good for me. I shouldn’t be ashamed.

I might be an increasingly strange, increasingly invisible middle-aged woman, hiding an ever-expanding perimenopausal body in boxy sweaters and boyfriend jeans, but clearly I’m not the only one who is struggling.

Why open myself up to the conversation that would certainly follow—the one that would surely include my role in the fact that our marriage is essentially over even if we can’t afford to live separately like normal people? Why would I want to go there when I can just pretend to ignore the fact that he is smoking himself into oblivion? Isn’t that what marriage is all about? Avoiding terrible arguments and self-examination that could expose your own complicity in the breakdown of your union?

My family had never uttered that phrase—that things would work out—because, quite simply, they didn’t believe it. They knew from almost direct experience in fact—my parents’ parents were all Holocaust survivors—that often things didn’t work out and that sometimes the worst happened instead. Faith in the future was not part of my DNA,

Better not to know than to get the wrong answer.

Autumn, my favorite season, has always made me sad—the brightness of the sky and trees, the promise of hope and renewal always feels like a trick, an invitation for disappointment, instead of a gift.

Being a child’s primary focus is temporary, fleeting; I knew that the aperture was closing, that the light on me would eventually dim and I’d be replaced with friends.

Joy is joy, no matter where you find it or what you’re doing, and those afternoons at Costco, sitting together under all that harsh light, was our version of special time.

All I knew was that his absence was proof that people stayed with you for the rest of your life no matter when you stopped seeing them or when their body disappeared from your world.

We see their marriage, vacations, work, evolve, in pictures; and yet who knows what happened in between the seconds caught on film. How it all wove together to make the whole of who they are.

I’m always waiting for Gary to panic, to make a scene, so I try to take up less space and air than he does. It’s like I’ve been holding my breath since we met, unable to fully inhale or exhale; as if there isn’t enough room in the world for both of us.

A complete stranger—part of the group of women who taught him how to correctly pronounce a natural sweetener this morning—sees him for who he is: the creative person he once was but stopped being. But making such an obvious connection hadn’t occurred to me.

Their communication seems effortless, nonverbal, entirely spiritual. I am both full of disdain for and deeply jealous of their apparent connection.

often wonder, as I do right now, if I’d known how much Gary and his anxiety might eclipse me—that being in his orbit might pull me away from my work, my thoughts, my own private world, the dissociated place in my head I’d always gone to that made it possible for me to think and work—whether I still would have married him.

All I feel is loneliness—every cell in my body and brain is empty and devoid of what’s supposed to connect me to the rest of the world—and to Gary—and I am full of a strange new grief, that of a nonjoiner who suddenly sees what they’ve been missing out on all these years: community, connection, the quiet comfort of others.

We didn’t know how to commiserate or comfort each other. We were three circles, occasionally just barely overlapping, a Venn diagram of connected separateness. Which had always seemed to me to be the loneliest feeling of all: having people around you who you could see but couldn’t ever reach.

Grief obliterates the present, forcing you to relive the past and dread the future.

I can’t remember when I stopped looking at myself, when my face and body, once narrow and all sharp angles and dark shadows in tight pants and short skirts, filled and rounded with age; when I became unrecognizable to myself and invisible in the world. For years I’ve secretly loved the anonymity, the invisibility, the freedom to move around without the annoyance of comments, of worrying about what I look like and what it means. Most of the time, no one even notices that I’m there.

The complete opposite of the "bird on her head" look.

“I told you long ago that I was happy to be wrong about you and Gary, and I was wrong. Loss has made you afraid of life, but you have to stay open. Porous. You have to let all the available light—all the tiny shards of joy—still flow through you.” She closes her eyes. “Who knows what beauty the rest of the way will bring.”

There is a long silence when we say nothing, when the enormity of where we are and how surreal it is to know that she will soon be gone hangs in the air—taken from the world any day as if by the rapture, with those of us left behind gaping in grief. “I wish,” she whispers, reaching out for Lucy, “I could see how all of this turns out.”