Grief and Dumb Questions

A personal essay by Anne Turnbow about the grief of divorce

The other night in one of my late night, glass of wine on the side of my bed, wasting-time-on-Instagram-sessions, I came across a reel of a woman whose husband died seven years ago.

Instead of moving onto my actual bedtime goal of reading a chapter of the top book of the five stacked on my bedside table, I explored the woman’s entire Instagram profile for a good fifteen minutes. Among other things, I learned that she had three boys with her deceased husband and remarried and gained two adopted children. At first, her tears and vulnerability made me cynical and not because she spoke in the language of the evangelical Christian crowd that I had left years ago and not because it looked like a team of people worked on her hair and makeup for every single post, but because I was jealous of her grief. She was allowed to move on and stay in the grief. To move on and be sad sometimes, that the father of her children, the first love of her life was gone and that would forever be encased in a kind of shrine in the depths of her soul. 

 Nobody would ever question her path of grief, judge her for being stuck in victimhood. I can imagine that her current husband has moments when he doesn’t want to share her affection or when he wonders if he would have been chosen in some dating line-up with her first husband. But for the most part, a grieving widow is rarely told to move on—unless by some family member who can’t bear to see her sadness anymore. Widows are even mentioned in the Bible multiple times as part of an ultimate list of people who deserve our mercy and compassion.

Meanwhile, the divorced woman is only mentioned in the context of sin and the long-standing and underlying assumption rooted in religious patriarchy: that women who divorce didn’t do enough to save their marriage, gave up on their family, or did something outright bad to cause the downfall of her union with a man who may or may not also be the father of her children and who represents her reason and hope for survival. Why in the hell would a woman not just stay when so much is at stake morally and emotionally and consequentially for the children? 

Seven-and-a-half years ago I fell in love with a woman, and although I had some idea over the course of my 18-year marriage, that I was on some spectrum of sexuality, not fully straight, I had no clue until the moments I began to realize my feelings for my friend and now girlfriend, that my particular sexuality would disrupt my life and ultimately end my marriage. Not until, in a moment of complete failure of integrity, I kissed her and knew that I couldn’t go back. When I say I couldn’t go back, I mean the entire world stopped spinning for those moments leaning against the side of Ms. Pac Man, in O’Henry’s, a gay bar like what I imagine my father might have frequented back in the mid ‘80’s in New Orleans. 

And yet, the slow, honest story of why our marriage failed had little to do with my sexuality. Our relationship started out in a sweet way when I was 17 and he was a foreign exchange student from Norway, and some of my fondest memories of my life exist in our first two years of marriage in our 500 square foot apartment in New Hampshire or during the summers we’d hike and visit his home in Norway. Over the years of a consistent struggle with intimacy, a crisis of fidelity ten years into our marriage, building resentments, our inability to negotiate power and communicate effectively, and the constant stress of his surgery career, our marriage could not hold much else. At the end of the day, me falling in love with a woman was the final straw.

And yet, I grieve. I grieve like a lunatic sometimes. I dream about him. I try to get his attention in my dreams. I cry about the losses of our divorce monthly. I grieve for the loss of a secure and familial relationship to his family who all live in Norway. When I began dating him in my senior year of high school, I fully pulled his family into my heart like the running back catches that damn ball and clutches it to his body with all he has and runs like hell to the end zone. I married him five years later right out of college and happily discarded my name and took on the full Norwegian Raustol identity. I learned Norwegian near-fluently and I have a full-on love of fjords, cardamon buns, a woodstove and rice porridge at Christmas and late summer nights on the porch talking and eating strawberries and cream. Although my ex-in-law parents still love me, it will never be the same, especially for two of his siblings. I have done the unforgivable and though I once was a sister, I am no longer. 

I grieve our family unity. The fact that my kids don’t get to be in the presence of their parents at the same time hardly ever. All the family vacations dissolved. The family holiday traditions, done. A house with two adults looking after the coop, done. Being a Norwegian wife, done. Being able to call my ex-husband at work to ask dumb questions even though he was doing important things. Done and done. Feeling his arms engulf me, his rough hands in mine. Seeing him enjoy food I’d made. Done and done. So yeah, I will probably be in some part of my grief journey for a long, long time and few people will understand, and that’s my work—to be ok with THAT. I have to be ok when I share a moment of sadness about all the loss and I get, “But you chose to divorce. You need to move on.” 

As I’ve processed that Instagram profile along with my countless other moments of bitter brooding about not finding a choir or audience for my very particular feelings of loss, the work is that I must let go of my need to have my grief validated and legitimized by the outside world.

What I can do is give myself care and permission to be on my own path of grief even if no one else cares—which I know isn’t actually true. But it is true that in a lot of people’s eyes, because I chose the grief, because I kissed the girl, because at the very end the day of my marriage, I was more than fifty percent responsible for “un-choosing” us—the two of us and the five of us—my pain is, well, not the highest priority in the current conversation of grief work. You won’t hear many podcasts about it and you won’t find zillions of articles about divorce grief because, believe me, I’m like a sympathy whore late at night in my bed. 

Here's the deal—it only matters if I legitimize and care for my own grief. Whether I understand and honor the layers of loss and how it activates me and affects me at different times of the year. Expecting anything else turns me into a victim and I’m just too old and have too much work to do to be gazing at a young widow’s Instagram page with my glass of red wine and cursing her for having more popular, allowable grief. The holidays are coming up and my grief will be moving right in trying to own the place, so I’ll be calling my girlfriend at work asking her more dumb questions and holding her small, soft hand a little more often. 

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Anne Turnbow (formerly, Anne Raustol) received an MFA from Bennington College in 2001. Her stories and essays have appeared in Rock and Sling, Rapid River Magazine, Florida Review, Sky Island Journal, Literary Mama, Willow Springs, and Litro. Anne lives in the mountains of North Carolina with her young adult children and two dogs who sleep plastered to her body. In addition to her current affinity for poetry and finding a home for her novel, Anne is working on a collection of stories with the theme of color. Every story begins with a color free-write: “Yellow is the color of…” and the story blooms from there. She recently started a small business called Water Leaf Writing where she is a writing coach, editor, and facilitator for community-based writing groups and retreats.

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