Two years ago, as I was going through a divorce I hadn’t wanted or expected, I struggled with memories I wanted to forget. How happy I had been at our wedding. How proud I was when his career took off. And how sincerely I had believed that, if I held on long enough, we could make it last.
The memories plagued me — signs, I thought, that I had been a sucker, a fool. And I couldn’t escape them. Though my youngest was leaving for college and my oldest was already gone, there were still too many reminders of 20-plus years of marriage lurking in our family home and among our friends and favorite haunts.
So, after decades as a wife, mother and physician in Oregon, I sold the house, said goodbye to dear friends, dropped my daughter off for her freshman year, and fled 600 miles to another state to become the medical director for a rural methadone clinic in a small town where I knew no one.
The job and the place were new to me, but not the work. I specialize in the treatment of addiction. Throughout my career I have worked in methadone clinics, which are largely the same. They open early, at 4 or 5 a.m. so patients can get their dose and make it to work on time. They have a line that leads to a dosing window. On the other side of the window, nurses or doctors sit like bank tellers in scrubs pushing plastic cups of cherry-flavored methadone through a slot. Sometimes the lines snake out into the parking lot.
I moved into a blue Victorian rental with white trim, just a 10-minute walk from my job. The house had a gable roof, scuffed wood floors and a bay window facing the street. Oh, I loved it. I would wake up in the dark for work and not worry about the noise I was making, no one who might roll over and growl, “Jesus, what the hell?”
At the end of each long day, there was no unhappiness to greet me at home. Just me, suggesting to myself that I put my feet up, and did I want a cup of tea? Maybe a nap?
In the evenings, I often talked for hours on the phone with my children, desperate for details of their lives, and I was racked with guilt when they asked so sweetly how I liked my new home, which was not their home and never would be.
Sometimes my solitude was a balm. Sometimes grief was a wave from nowhere, and I was drowning.
Every day I saw the same patients, some traveling for hours to receive their medication. The older man with the long beard, bent over his walker and unable to make it from the car to the window without stopping to catch his breath. The tired mother with a toddler. The schoolteacher darting in and out, hoodie up and head down. The bulky guy with the teardrop tattoos under his right eye that the clinic counselor told me signified prison time, but the nurse said, no, it meant he had killed someone. All I knew was that he was sweetly polite with me.
Then there was the angry man with his greasy hair in a ponytail who wouldn’t say hello or make eye contact and whose locked-in rage kept me silent as well.
I say I didn’t expect the divorce or want it, but that isn’t right. We’d had counseling for years while resentments stacked up and nothing changed. I was too private, he said, too contained. Also, never satisfied. Which was true. I was also terribly lonely — often in his company. I had so many journal entries riffing on the same theme: “I should go, I should go, I should go.”
But I couldn’t do it. We had loved and raised our children together. We had grieved parents’ deaths together. He could make me laugh harder than anyone before or since. He made salty tuna fish salad with mustard for lunch and perfectly greasy tacos for dinner. Sometimes, we played Scrabble.
And I couldn’t destroy the future I told myself was just around the corner, the one in which everything would be different. In that future, we would savor time with our children and each other. We would take walks, have meandering conversations, and enjoy the grandchildren while we still had our health. Never mind that he didn’t particularly like babies. Or, eventually, me.
So, I didn’t leave. But finally, he’d had enough of the distance between us. Finally, he had the courage to leave me instead.
For weeks, every Monday, I filled and labeled bottles of methadone to take to the jail for a woman who was incarcerated. I worked at the clinic for months before she was released and I was able to meet her in person.
I had expected someone hard, ground down. But she was a tiny blonde in her 20s with the kind of bouncy energy I associate with cheerleading. As I set the plastic cup under the machine, she told me she had been so surprised when they informed her that she was being released. She called her boyfriend to tell him. He didn’t have a car, so he wouldn’t be able to pick her up, but she wanted him to know she was getting out.
And then there he had been! Waiting outside when they opened the door. She couldn’t believe it. She was so happy telling me about it, a huge smile on her face, and her blonde hair in a ponytail, dyed blue at the ends.
On the days I didn’t work, I read entire books uninterrupted and took long walks in the hills above town, letting my mind wander. I remembered my mother’s quiet, “Are you sure?” when I told her we were getting married. I recalled a good friend, only weeks before the wedding, saying, “Maybe you could just live together?”
I thought of my father during those first years of my marriage, and then again toward the end, calling every few months to say, “Jessie, is he good to you? Make sure he’s good to you.” I would reassure him because I wanted it to be true and because sometimes, even as our marriage unraveled, it was true: “Yeah, Dad, he’s good. We’re OK.”
The day after the tiny blonde got out of jail, the angry man was back, transformed. I saw him arrive as I walked through the lobby. He was scrubbed clean, his hair was washed and falling in gorgeous brown waves to his shoulders, and he was smiling. He looked like Jesus at his peak. Beautiful and glowing.
The tiny blonde was in the lobby, too. When it was her turn, I called her number, and as I filled her cup with red liquid, the no-longer-angry man was called to the adjacent window. Against the rules, he popped over to her side and dropped a lollipop on the ledge in front of her. Then he popped back to the other window to get his dose.
Oh, the look on her face. The angry man, it turned out, was her boyfriend! I’d had no idea.
Of course, their relationship was doomed. He was still using fentanyl, and she was just out of jail, trying to get on her feet. Neither of them had stable housing. They were going to face difficulties, separately and together, that I could barely comprehend. I may be a little jaded, but the writing was on the wall.
Still: the lollipop, his smile, that glow. And he had shown up outside the jail for her, despite not having a car, like a miracle. No matter what comes next, all of that was true. All of it happened.
As did greasy tacos, wild laughter, and children raised well and loved deeply. All of that was true, too. In my marriage, all of it happened.
About a month after the not-so-angry man and the tiny blonde reunited, I left my job and moved again — not back to Oregon but to my hometown in New Mexico. After enough miles logged in the hills, enough grief and getting through it, sufficient hours of surprised delight at my own company, and moments witnessing others’ unexpected joy, I realized I didn’t want, or need, to be alone anymore.
I don’t know what happened with the not-so-angry man and the tiny blonde. I can’t know with certainty that they didn’t last. But I understand now: If and when their love is gone, it doesn’t mean they were fools, and it won’t negate the joy that was there while it lasted. It will only mean it’s over. So, I think maybe it is good we don’t know when love is doomed. I think I’m glad no one is there to read the writing on the wall.
Jessica Gregg is a physician in New Mexico.
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