The heart can break even when you’re no longer in love.
The worst day of my life was October 26, 2011, when the man I was no longer in love with was dying.
- • •
Less than a week before, I was at a tailgate with some friends when my father called me and told me that my ex-husband, Jody, had gone to the emergency room with terrible abdominal pain. It was his weekend to have our two children, and my parents had picked them up from their dad’s house before his girlfriend took him to the hospital.
I got another call after the kids were in bed. Their father had been admitted. No one was sure what was going on yet. I tried not to worry. Maybe it was appendicitis, I thought.
It wasn’t. He had a case of acute pancreatitis, and things didn’t look good.
The next day, I told my son and daughter, ages 10 and 8, that their dad was pretty sick and needed to be in the hospital for a while. They were concerned but took it in stride, as kids tend to do. I looked up acute pancreatitis online and tried not to worry. My ex-husband had been healthy for most of his life, so this diagnosis had come as a shock to everyone.
My parents were still friends with my former in-laws, so I was able to get updates from my dad throughout the day and into the next. Jody’s condition became critical, and he was quickly moved to the intensive care unit.
I was told to pray. That was all I could really do.
I was as honest with our children as I could be without alarming them. I found myself saying generic things like, “The doctors are doing their very best to help Daddy get better,” and “He’s still sick but hopefully he’ll start getting better soon.” I tried to believe my own words.
My son, who has always asked bold questions, asked me, “Is Daddy going to die?”
I couldn’t lie. So I told him the truth: “I don’t know.”
The next morning, not even a week after my ex had staggered into the ER, my father called. I sat down on the edge of my bed.
It was bad, my dad told me. Jody’s kidneys had crashed and his other organs had followed. His pancreas, according to the doctor, was “eating itself alive.” He had maybe a 10% chance of making it. If I was going to go to the hospital, I had better go immediately.
I don’t remember grabbing my bag and keys and telling my fiancé that I was leaving for the hospital to say goodbye, making the twenty-minute drive to the hospital, finding a parking spot, and walking into the ICU. I floated somewhere in space until I landed in the waiting room reserved for families only. Jody’s family were good people and didn’t question why I, the ex-wife, was among them. The air was thick with fear and sorrow and disbelief.
Suddenly the air was sucked out of the room as Jody’s mother entered. She was supported on either side by her sisters.
There is no sorrow that can compare to the sorrow of a mother whose child is slipping away.
Someone asked me if I wanted to see my ex-husband. I had less than five minutes to basically wrap up my relationship with him and tell him goodbye.
This was someone I had known nearly all my life. He had been my first boyfriend. We had dated almost exclusively through high school and college, gotten married a month after college graduation, and had been married for over ten years before our divorce. Even though we’d fallen out of love with each other and in love with other people, we still had a connection because of the two children we shared.
He now lay unconscious in a hospital bed, a ventilator close by. I walked over to him and stroked his hair for the first time in over three years. Even though I was pretty sure he couldn’t hear me, I told him that I would always love him and that I would make sure that our children were going to be okay. Or something like that. Autopilot had taken over by then.
I found myself back in the room with the family who had forgiven me and allowed me into this intimate and terrible time. All they could do was comfort one another as they sobbed and listened to the pastor’s prayers for their son, their brother, their nephew, their grandson. Everyone waited for the doctor to come in with the news that everyone dreads.
An hour went by and he was still alive. Then another hour, and another.
He hung on for the rest of the day and through the night as we all prayed for a miracle. His survival rate was in the single digits, but somehow he was hanging on.
For weeks it was touch and go as he had surgeries and procedures to fix the damage from multiple organ failure, but his condition finally became stable enough to be moved out of ICU into a regular room. After three months, he was discharged, just in time to make it to the annual Daddy-Daughter Dance with our daughter.
Three years later he married the girlfriend who had been in the waiting room, and they now have a 4-year-old son.
- • •
This is the first time I’ve written about those events, now almost nine years ago. As I allowed my mind to revisit that terrible day, I remembered the physical pain I had felt. It was like hot lead in my chest. Because there was nowhere for my mind to put the information I was receiving, I could only look at the book of Psalms and stare at the words as the blackness descended.
It was ironic. I was heartbroken but was no longer in love with my ex-husband. How was this possible? It wasn’t really my loss. Not anymore.
The grief I felt as he was dying was not for me.
It was for my children, who were losing their daddy and didn’t know it yet. It was for his parents, who were going to lose their only son, and for his sister, whose little brother was dying. It was for his girlfriend, whose world was shattering.
The searing pain became unbearable as I thought of my ex and the times he’d miss with his children if he left this planet. Watching his son graduate high school. Walking his daughter down the aisle. Having the chance to marry again and to live a life beyond 40 years.
I’d hurt for others before, many times. My heart went out to people I had never known. I’ve often cried for people I know only through the news or books or social media. But this hurt seemed to be on a different plane of existence. I felt it down to my core. My soul.
For the first time in my life I was able to see love from this vantage point. As I looked into an unfamiliar lens, I was able to take sorrow beyond myself and feel it for the people who loved him most.
- • •
As I write this, I think about the families and loved ones who prayed as hard as we did and still lost. I don’t know why we were spared the deeper and unending grief that comes with death of a child, husband, or parent. There is no known explanation. I do know that I’m incredibly thankful that my ex was given a very rare second chance, and that his children and their grandparents and extended family dodged a bullet that had been fired right at them. At his girlfriend. At me.
As selfish with love as I’ve been in the past, and as angry and resentful as I was when my marriage ended, I’m thankful that I was somehow able to drop it all and experience love from an angle that I didn’t know existed.
It was an exercise in compassion that I will never forget.