You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

“You know what one of the saddest damn things is? One of the parts of all this that I’m grieving

the most? When I lost my marriage, I lost all that shared history. I lost the person who knew me in a way no one else does, and when I lost him, I also lost being known like that.”

It is a deep hurt, it is hard to explain to someone outside the relationship. It is deep pain.

“I mean, it’s all the little things,” I said. “The private jokes and made-up songs and silly voices and comedy bits we’d do.”

Yes. You still knee-jerk say those funny things, and they sting now.

“All that shared history, all that institutional knowledge from the marriage—what

what do I do with it? What do I do when a little piece from my old life floats to the surface and bobs there right in front of my face. Who do I tell? Who do I laugh with or sing along with?”

How do you handle it?” “I don’t know how I feel. Sad? Swindled? Cheated out of something? There’s no joint custody for intangibles. We can’t just divide them up like dishes or artwork. There is no

selling off memories and splitting the proceeds.”

Nope, I am left to sit with this

phrase that broke over me like a wave I didn’t see coming: inability to metabolize disappointment.

Thank you for the words for this feeling. Inability to metabolize disappointment. How many times can you be disappointed, 11+ years later by words and actions that others can see coming a mile away?

What happens if you don’t process what has happened to you, what you’ve done, what you didn’t do? It sits inside you. It

can make you feel like you’re choking, like you can’t take a full breath.

Let me tell you what you don’t know, what you would know if you were still part of my life. I can cook now, like, really cook. I have more tattoos. I can throw a baseball with the same speed

and accuracy with my right and left hands. Our neighbor taught me how to use the lawn mower, and he replaced the carburetor on the trimmer, and he taught me how to use that, too. All the stuff you left behind in the basement is gone. I dragged it to the alley

We are left to pick up all the pieces, carry them all. It is beyond overwhelming.

in a rainstorm after you moved away, and whatever passersby didn’t claim, the trash collectors took. You broke my mother’s heart, my father’s heart, my sisters’ hearts. I still hear from people I thought were “your people,” so I suppose they’re my people, too. Sometimes I still wear the perfume I wore on our wedding day, because I like it. I’ve never felt better. I’ve never felt worse. Your absence has made the life I have now possible....

This is exactly what I need to do.

forty-eight years is more than I have left to live. Even if I were to remarry, I would never be married for that long. I don’t have enough time. This is something else I mourn. My

chance at a golden anniversary, at growing old with someone who knew me when I was young, died in the divorce.

This is often in my thoughts. It still makes me cry.

The Scraps

Maybe things get better in the aftermath Or maybe all you’re left with is the scraps The oddities and endings The mangled beyond mending The wondering what comes after that

What do I do with the scraps? Trying to make them beautiful. Lipstick on a pig?

Maybe all you’re left with is...

But the more time passed, the less I hurt. The less I hurt, the more I was able to see how beautiful, how full, my life was.

True. Less hurt but still hurt.

I’ve wanted for years to understand what happened, and

This is so deep for me too, I don't know what happened and never will and it makes it so very difficult to walk fully into the light.

part of me feels I’ve failed because I don’t fully understand—can’t fully understand because I don’t have access to the whole picture. I only have access to the mine.

Exactly

about carrying light with you: No matter where you go, and no matter what you find—or don’t find—you change the darkness just by entering it. You clear a path through it.

“They chose you. They chose you both, and they knew what the challenges would be.”

This is of my children too.

It had never occurred to me before that children might choose their parents,

she believes that when we

choose our parents, we know their limitations. We know the ways we will be hurt by them, or let down by them, and we choose them anyway. She believes the lessons we need to learn in...

I don’t know if I can believe that I chose my parents, but I know this: I’d choose t...

I don’t know if I can believe that my children chose me, that they chose to come to this earth throug...

think that they saw me as worthy. That they saw us, as a pair, as worth...

Love this idea

—I could say it’s difficult to forgive someone who hasn’t expressed remorse. I could counter with questions: Why do I need to forgive someone who doesn’t seem to be sorry? What if forgiveness doesn’t

So difficult. Unimaginable pain.

need to be the goal? The goal is the wish: peace. Can there be peace without forgiveness? How do you heal when there is an open wound that is being kept open, a scab always being picked until it bleeds again? I could say this is my task: seeking peace, knowing

the wound may never fully close— “Forgiveness is complicated. To be at peace, I think what I need...

Feeling the peace, finally

Earlier I posed a question I couldn’t answer: If there had been no postcard, no notebook, would our marriage have

survived? I know the answer now. The answer is a gift that assembling these pieces has handed me. The answer is no.

I can see now that I put up with too much. I accepted too much in my marriage. That was not how it is supposed to be. Is this why it is so hard to forgive? I forgave too much as it was happening in real time, pushed down my intuition, let it go for the sake of the relationship?

Then I know that there is room in me for a second huge and timeless life. —Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly

I love this so much! I am inter, in my second huge and timeless life!

Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.