Mirror

It was uncanny. He sat across the table from a man he had known casually for four years, listening to a story that mirrored his own in most of its detail. They sipped margaritas and munched chips and salsa and talked around the bustle and distractions of waiters and diners coming and going and the clatter of dishes and the charged party air of Chevy’s—the liveliest restaurant in the little town.

After more than twenty years of marriage, his friend’s wife had suddenly grown cold and distant, and informed him that the marriage was dead. She had no intention or hope to rehabilitate their relationship and would not try. He was devastated and deeply hurt and angry and bewildered. He had been taken completely off his guard by this catastrophic development, and had floundered in the seething soup of his turmoil for several months.

How could she so calmly throw away 23 years of their lives. It surely hadn’t been that horrible to live with him. He had been faithful to the marriage, and was not abusive. They had shared a lifetime of good times, weathered all the challenges and difficulties that life had thrown at them, and raised three great kids. Now they were just getting close to the place where they would have more leisure time to spend together. He had worked his whole life as a grocery checker looking forward to these coming years, anticipating how their relationship would blossom and grow once the cares and stresses of child-rearing were behind them. And in a fleeting moment, it had all vanished before his eyes. He had been cheated out of the dream he had built his life around. He had nothing to fall back on except the patterns and habits and structure he had formed over a lifetime.

As he sat listening to his friend, he was moved by the similarity of their stories. He was also struck with how far he had come since he had first learned that his own marriage was dying seven years ago. His heart went out to his friend, and he listened and shared freely from his own experience. It seemed to help a little. His friend had felt so utterly devastated and alone—so much a failure by his own standards—and hearing the story of another so similar to his own reassured him and gave him strength. In fact, it fed and strengthened them both to share this horrible thing. It seemed to meet them both at their own point of need.

Their food came, followed by another round of margaritas, and they talked on into the evening. They shared their sense of loss and helplessness in the face of the thing that had happened to them both. They shared their sense of uncertainty about the mystery that drives women in their forties so often to this place where they utterly and irrevocably give up on their men. Both of them had seen it often enough with their friends to suspect that some specific and perhaps predictable mechanism in the dynamics of relationship was at work, but neither felt that he understood what it was. Both suspected that their inability to understand it was part of the problem, and both suspected that their befuddlement had something to do with the differences between the genders. They suspected that very few men really understood this thing.

The lights in the restaurant flickered and went out. The patrons cheered as if some spectacular feat had been performed, and then settled back to their meals in the soft twilight filtering in from the open air patio. The sun had just set, and there was just enough fading light to see. The friends had finished their meal and were nearing the bottom of their second round of margaritas. They sat in the dusky fading light, reflecting on the hard dark things they had shared. The waiters brought out a few candles, and the patrons gradually disappeared into the night. Soon the place was near empty and the two sat in the dim quiet night. They talked more quietly now, turning to the subject of what comes next. He was years ahead of his friend on this subject, and found himself reassuring him and encouraging him with stories of growth and self discovery and help from unexpected places. He found himself urging him earnestly to embrace the horrific emotions that threatened to overwhelm him, and let them run their course, and yet somehow to find a way to resist the temptation to let them poison his divorce with bitterness and fighting. He had managed to do this himself only because the heaviest emotional turmoil had come long before the logistical and tactical tasks of physical disengagement. He suspected that his friend would have a much harder time keeping his divorce civil since he was still in the most tortured, shattered phase as the outward process unfolded. He was so hurt and battered that he found it difficult not to lash out. But he did love his family, and perhaps his love would give him the strength he needed.

As the evening wore long, they eventually found their talk unwinding, and finally the energy of their common burden smoothed out to a wide flat stillness. There was little left to say. They both had looked into their mirror bond and seen a small fragment of their own hearts. Now they could each go home to what lay ahead a little more settled, a little braver, a little clearer, a little closer to wholeness.