Lightening the Load of the Cross

Originally posted at The Way of the Rose Facebook group April 12, 2020

Novena Day 53

The Sorrowful Mysteries

Carrying of the Cross

What to write for Easter Sunday? I debated about it. Today we are asked to pray the sorrowful mysteries in the Way of the Rose novena, but today is also the celebration of the Resurrection, which is a glorious mystery.

While praying the rosary on my daily walk I realized that few people will be at church today and there will be a singular lack of celebration for an Easter Sunday. In short, the world is currently carrying a heavy cross, unsure of our destination. I don’t think it’s an accident that we are praying the sorrowful mysteries today, nor is it an accident that the Carrying of the Cross was the mystery that has so far received the most discussion on my posts.

Let’s feel our way through this together. We already know there are many ways to view and feel the Carrying of the Cross. There is no question that sorrow will be a part of it no matter how we look. But what is the source of the sorrow? How deep does it go? And what can we do to mitigate or transmute it?

After my previous posts, you’ll know that I’ve had some pretty hard slogs with some pretty heavy crosses. But what if I told you that was only the beginning for my own personal crosses?

I know, right?

On the seventh anniversary of Zane’s death, my daughter came down to breakfast looking mopey. We were scheduled to be leaving for a family reunion in Vermont before noon, so I was a bit annoyed with her pokiness—until she suddenly began sobbing. Alarmed, I asked her what was wrong.

“I read something that made me think you and Dad are going to get divorced!”

My blood ran cold. Bill had been behaving oddly recently, and we’d been talking about going to therapy together to try and heal the breach that had opened up. He’d insisted on choosing the therapist but as far as I could tell had made no progress in two months. She took me upstairs to her father’s laptop, casually left on the floor on his side of the bed.

“I was waiting for you and Bryce to finish with his bath last night and just started reading.”

Bill had left his email open; there were a string of emails to and from a woman I didn’t know. They were casual and intimate and signed with “Love.” Despite saying no when I’d asked him point-blank, he was clearly having an affair. I called Bill in a cold fury and told him that his daughter had read his emails and shown them to me.

“You can consider yourself separated, you fucker!” I blurted and hung up. He moved out before we got back from Vermont.

The news got worse. The “other woman” was a 25-year-old actress, literally just under half my age, with long blonde hair and bad eyesight. I couldn’t believe we’d survived so much heartbreak together only to succumb to something as banal and clichéd as a midlife crisis—he’d exchanged me for a younger model.

Dark as life had been after Zane, it at least made sense. None of this made sense to me. I knew Bill and I had a deep, deep connection. I knew he would never have survived the previous seven years if I hadn’t been who I was. I knew he cared deeply about his children and wanted to live with them. So how could he behave with such reckless disregard for all he had previously valued? The inability to understand had me questioning everything about our lives together. Had it all just been a huge mistake? After one terrible evening, I confessed to a friend, “I wish he had committed suicide all those years ago. It would have been easier.”

Not only did I not recognize my life, I didn’t even recognize me. I cast about for anything I could grab onto that could help me survive. I reread To Love Is to Be Happy to Be Happy With by Barry Neil Kaufman and remembered I was responsible for my own happiness, not him. I analyzed the pain I felt and realized I was angry with him because he claimed I was the one he loved and that our connection was deep and real, yet he was not fighting for us. He had just given up. I also realized he couldn’t read my mind, so I wrote him a letter telling him that I still loved him and that I thought we could get back what we had and more if he chose to fight for it. I was giving him a one-time only opportunity to work it through without another person in the way.

Just expressing myself like that calmed me and made me feel like me again, but his response was all over the place. I knew he was tempted, but something was stopping him from just taking me up on the offer. He hedged until he could hedge no longer, and then he blew it. We were over as a couple. I was sad, but I had lived my truth and I was ready to move on.

A year later, after a blow-up over a particularly callous bit of behavior, his denial crumbled. He sat in my kitchen that afternoon and humbly apologized—for everything. That raw honesty marked a turning point in his relationships with both me and Kalea. But it also marked a turning point in his relationship with himself. He was finding it hard to live with the knowledge that he’d had everything he wanted in his hands and he’d thrown it away.

The following years were fascinating and dramatic—mostly for him. My life was relatively stable given that we had kids in common, but I watched him go through some literally unbelievable events. It may seem odd, but through it all our friendship deepened. Whatever else was going on, we were real with each other, always available to help. In short, we had found our way back to being best friends.

In 2017 things briefly appeared somewhat stable for both of us, and I had the idea to write out our story. I didn’t know any other couple who’d been able to heal in the same way we had. People would ask me how we’d done it all the time. I thought a book written in alternating chapters would be really unique and could be really helpful for others. He agreed, and I wrote up an outline.

But when he got home from his annual birthday trip to the Grand Canyon that September he wasn’t feeling well. He was misdiagnosed twice before an ER discovered his liver enzymes were off the charts. He had an autoimmune disease that would probably mean a liver transplant at some point, but he was feeling sicker than he should have. He headed back to his native New Zealand to see if it would be possible to get a liver transplant earlier there than he could get it here. After the initial tests he took Kalea on a cross-country trip before he dropping her off at her new university in February. By the time they got there, he didn’t have enough energy to do anything but head straight back to the hospital.

In the meantime, life was falling apart in Brooklyn. Our landlord was fighting with his business partner to whom he owed money. The partner wanted us out immediately. I had a temporary job that would end in June and very little money to move with. In addition, we had discovered high lead levels in the backyard where we had stupidly grown a vegetable garden without prior testing, and toxic mold in the rest of the house that had probably been keeping us all from being truly healthy. I had no idea what to do next, but I was oddly calm about it. I asked others for ideas about jobs and places to go.

Bill was already sick enough to qualify for a transplant, but the doctors thought he might be too sick; he might have cancer of the bile ducts which would disqualify him for transplant. It would also mean he would die sooner rather than later. None of the cancer tests were conclusive, though, and he was finally put on the transplant list at the end of May. My daughter and I flew in to help. I could only stay for a week, but she took a leave of absence from school in order to qualify as a living donor or to be his transplant buddy if a liver from a dead donor came in. He was in terrible shape while I was there, and every day we hoped to hear that a liver had become available. But nothing had changed by the time I left. We didn’t know how long he could hang on. On Father’s Day, just before Kalea was about to be approved as a living donor, we got the joyous news that a liver had become available and they were prepping him for surgery. As he went off to surgery, the whole ward cheered.

Four hours later Kalea called us, sobbing. They had found cancer in his bile ducts and sewn him back up without doing the transplant. The hospital staff were very nice to them, giving him a private room and wheeling in a bed in for her, too. She stayed in the room with him until they made arrangements for him to go to a hospice where his cousin lived. He was 56 years old with no money to speak of, and all of his considerable term life insurance had ended at 55. Life didn’t just look bleak for him, it was bleak for us as well. Kalea stayed with him until the end; he died about two and a half months later on his fifty-seventh birthday.

So many crosses, of all shapes and sizes.

What have I learned from all the crosses I’ve carried in my life that can help us carry the current cross?

The load may be impossibly heavy from time to time, but it will always be easier to carry if it is shared—and others are happy to share if you are real with them. The cross doesn’t magically disappear if you bottle your feelings up or if you pretend everything’s fine. And it doesn’t go away if you’re blaming your situation or your problems on someone else. Figure out what’s causing the pain and release it if possible. Take steps to mitigate suffering, yours and others’. You never know when someone else will be able to help you.

Always, always remind yourself of what is important.

In some weird alchemical process, the weight of a cross can almost always be lightened by looking at it differently. That’s one way the rosary can help. The circle of the rosary reminds us that the suffering of the crucifixion is never the end of the story. The Resurrection is still to come.

And miracles can happen when we align our hearts with the Mother’s love.