I have been mulling over this essay since last Thanksgiving. The idea came that evening, while I was driving back home. For two and a half decades, I had spent Thanksgiving with Douglas and while the locations and the people changed, our spending it together was a constant. And while we were now into our second year of divorce, we have continued spending Thanksgiving together, and I have no reason to believe that will change any time soon. The big difference these past two years of course is that he stays in what was formally our home and I leave to return to my apartment.
I am beyond grateful that we salvaged a relationship out of the divorce. The fact that we have had to face so much unrelenting loss – family members, Roxy, our marriage – has weighed down on the holidays beyond this change in living situation. I think he would agree that, had it been acrimonious and we’d stopped talking altogether, both of us would have lost out on what has given us so much comfort while we took these brutal left hooks and uppercuts from life.
Nonetheless, as I was driving through my former neighborhood, seeing the homes people had already started to decorate with lights for the holidays, I couldn’t help but think of all the traditions I’d lost. Douglas never much cared for decorating for any of the holidays, never mind Christmas. The tree was the one exception; that had always been his thing. But I would go all out with lights on bushes and along the house, a sleigh with giant present boxes under the maple tree, wreaths under the second story windows, and one candle inside each window. But there I was, driving through this town and a life that was no longer mine.
And then, in just one week, we would lose Kane, on what would have been our twenty-fifth anniversary. Who says the gods don’t have a twisted sense of humor? In the devastating weeks that followed, nostalgia washed over me like a tidal wave, rolling me in a churn of emotional and sensory memories. Losing him brought the loss of Roxy back in a rush, in ways that I didn’t expect. He had come into our lives such a short time after we got her and she had been the only dog he had ever known.
As with Roxy and with so many of the other losses that have come in the past few years, I have come to appreciate how easily I ‘recovered’ these memories. Just driving past a particular park, or washing blankets, or when walking out of the grocery store after a quick errand. I’m able to remember going to that specific park, first with Roxy, then both of them, and then just Kane. I’m able to smell my dogs and see their hair on a blanket. Or, I’m jolted as I walk out of the store and realize that no dog will be in the back seat waiting expectantly for me. I know that in time, these memories will change. Some will disappear altogether. But many of them will just start to fade, like an old photograph. And when I look at that photo, the hurt and loss won’t be as sharp. But there will still be those rare occasions when, because of some particular circumstance, the loss will rise up like high tide, and I’ll remember what it felt like to be in the tidal wave.
I suspect this is a big part of the reason why I am now having lots of little flashes of memories from my entire life. I’ll be reading a book and a passage will suddenly trigger one of these long-forgotten memories. It will be, more often than not, nothing more than a short instance in the past. But, what really trips me up is how vivid the sense memory is that goes along with it. One of these recent ‘flashbacks’ included things like the season (a hot summer), the song I was listening to (All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow). Stranger still, I was back in the body of who I was then: a college student working a summer job as a catering van driver in Dallas. It all came back to me as though I had been teleported in a time machine to the driver’s seat of that van, with all the feelings and thoughts I was having in that moment. And then I’m snapped back into the present and who I am now, feeling a little bewildered.
This is either something you’ve experienced and so you get it on a gut level or, you think I’m totally mad. To be honest, I feel a little crazy myself when it happens. What I’m currently grappling with now is why? What is prompting these little flashbacks? As I said to my therapist, “This is what I imagine is meant by, ‘I saw my whole life flash before my eyes.’” A little morbid, I know. What’s stranger is a lot of this is tangled up with a prescient sense that there are major life changes just over the horizon.
Douglas is changing jobs and may soon sell the house we got together. And so now, whenever I drive up to visit him and pull into the driveway, I catch myself thinking, “Someday will be the last day I do this.” I have often had other moments like this, such as when I’m on my way to work, where I’ll think for no particular reason, “Someday, I won’t drive this route.” Funny enough, I did in fact just recently drive the same route to work before we moved into our house! It was almost like self-induced nostalgia!
And while there’s a tinge of sadness for all the reasons you might expect, there’s also a little thrill of “I won’t be constantly reminded of what I’ve lost every time I come here because soon I won’t be!” There’s a thrill of excitement in “What will this new life be like?!” As Douglas has often remarked, my instinct has always been to try and manage an unpleasant memory by changing something in my environment, and so I know this may be the same thing on a larger scale. While I know I’ll always be checking my rearview mirror, I have to keep my eyes forward, facing the direction I’m traveling. Unlike driving, there really is no going back the way I came, and so I should stick to just the occasional glance backwards.
Update – May, 2025: Re-reading this essay, first written in late January of this year, itis hard for me not to laugh at this sentence from above: “What’s stranger is a lot of this is tangled up with a prescient sense that there are major life changes just over the horizon.” Within just a couple of months of this initial draft, I would start homing in what would be one of those major decisions: moving to New York City. I had toyed with the idea starting last year but I knew something was holding me back. Namely, I knew I wasn’t ready to let go of the little routine Douglas and I had established with Kane at the center of it. And then, abruptly and painfully, Kane was taken from us. Suddenly, the anchor keeping me moored here had been pulled up and I was adrift.
That didn’t mean I immediately started looking for apartments. No, it took me a few months to really start seriously entertaining the idea. I started, as I so often do in situations like this, by asking everyone close to me what they thought. While I might often appear to be leaping before I look, I do in fact ask for guidance. One person in particular said something that rattled me more than I expected.
“I’m starting to seriously think about moving to New York.”
“Ok, so when?”
“Well, I did just re-sign my lease back in August.”
“So, ok, that means about six months.”
That one conversation would replay in my head for several weeks.
I finally raised it with Douglas who took it in stride as much because he knows me better than anyone and wasn’t surprised. But, he was also one of the first of many would say in the weeks to come, “You’ll be so happy there” which made it start to feel inevitable. As has so often been the case with me, once the target has been identified, it’s hard for me not to feel like an arrow, just loosed from a taught bow, on an inexorable path. Or, as Douglas has said, “I know you. Once you’ve made up your mind about something, there’s nothing that will stop you.”
Don’t get me wrong. For several weeks, I would still wake up in the middle of the night, with a vague sense of panic. ‘What are you thinking?! You have a nice secure situation! Why are you going to change it?!’ But then these thoughts would be replaced with, ‘Why not? You’ve made so many other life-altering decisions these past few years. This is the one that scares you?! Get over it.’
But there is one memory that really jumps out at me that I look back at now as a bit of incredible foreshadowing. Two summers ago, I was unpacking boxes, both a little excited to be in my own place after all these years, and also sad at suddenly being alone. As I was bending over to put stuff away in one of the drawers of the bathroom in the very apartment I’m in right now, I got the most intense flash of a future scene in which I was doing the reverse – packing it all up. And in that scene, the future emotion I felt as though I were living it right then, was excitement to be packing up for another move. I remember standing up, a little shocked, because I couldn’t help thinking to myself, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?! You just moved into this place and here you are already imagining yourself leaving it?’ But despite that attempt at being rational, I couldn’t escape the feeling: ‘This is temporary. This place is just a way station for you.’
And here I am, staring at a very distinct timeline. June 1st is the deadline for giving my 60 days’ notice to vacate. Within two months, I will have to secure an apartment in New York City for an August 1st move-in at the latest.
I just dropped off my notice. I have crossed the Rubicon. Alea iacta est. So much for glancing in the rearview mirror. It’s eyes forward now.