Having a coffee date with my middle daughter, we got to discussing an article I wrote last year about how close I came to suicide on one occasion when my first marriage had failed. She was so very thankful I got through it—some don’t.
Within moments it was like I was transported back there. Noticing my willingness to answer questions and be accessible in that grief, her curiosity augmented the space I needed to share into.
I began to share not only of the revelation I got—that I was reminded that I had three dear children that needed me—but also of the character of the grief in that time.
I shared that I grieved solidly for 9 months, almost as if it were a gestation period. After that time elapsed, it was like a switch went on inside me and I reached an important transition. But there was one kind of grief that I felt for three years—until I married again.
During those three years, I cared for my daughters on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and every second weekend. I would look forward to the Friday afternoon, plan dates and activities and visits and time together, but I loathed the barren emptiness I experienced after taking them back to their mother on Sunday nights.
Those nights I dropped them off, I was relieved that they were happy with either their mother or I—I just wanted them content. But as I drove the 20 kilometres home, I’d often sob my heart out, very often to Avril Lavigne. (Even now when I hear Avril Lavigne, I’m shot back to 2003-2004 in a flash, and I love it.)
There was just so much sheer core sorrow in having to say goodbye when I felt like everything that was important to me could be taken away just like that. But it was also the bone dry and excruciating loneliness that I felt being in my own company.
It was just so foreign to be all alone, and to be honest, I hated it. For six whole months I lamented being alone and would often bewail my very existence, even though I was amid a personal spiritual revival.
Whole weeks during school holidays were another thing altogether. I looked forward to them with so much expectancy, yet on the second last day before taking my daughters home I was often miserable and moody—which was a form of denial that loss was again imminent. I would recover on that final day, to make the absolute most of my time with them. And when I finally did get them home, I then often had 24-48 hours of the worst loneliness anyone can endure.
I’ve actually worked for my former wife, which shows we had a very cooperative separation even though I experienced the most immense grief. Those first nine months genuinely felt as though I’d lost everything.
Yet, as I was reflecting with my daughter, I couldn’t help but say it, that “those harrowing loneliest of times were what connected me to God—because God was surely all I had left.” I had the love of my parents, my two sponsors in AA, the pastor and the elders and the people in the church, but other than that and my three daughters, I had nobody and nothing.
The ironic and paradoxical thing nowadays is I pine to go back to this time of my worst grief and lament. It was formational and foundational, a time like this before or since I’ve not had anywhere near that intimacy.
But had I an hour meter for how many hours I either sobbed or lamented, I’d hate to think of the tally. Such a brutally lonely season lasts and lasts and lasts, and it’s a situation that cannot be shifted.
But on a night like tonight, when a nearly 27-year-old asks what it was like for me when she was 8, we both feel an enormity of contentedness, so thankful to God for his faithfulness.
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