Remnants

If you are searching for evidence that there is still love in this world, go to a grief support group. I don’t mean that sentimentally. Sit in a room with people who have lost husbands, wives, children, parents, siblings, grandparents, sometimes more than one of them, and listen to the way they talk about the people who are gone. I’ve never seen so much love concentrated in one place. It doesn’t always look like love. Sometimes it looks like anger. Sometimes guilt. Sometimes someone crying over something that happened twenty years ago. Sometimes it is a woman talking about the way her husband made coffee every morning, or a daughter remembering something her mother used to say, or someone describing the unbearable instinct to pick up the phone and call a person who is no longer there. But underneath all of it is love.

It is love with nowhere physical to go. The person is gone, but the impulse toward them remains. You still want to tell them something. You still see something funny and think they would love it. You still reach for the phone. You still buy something at the grocery store because they liked it. Your mind continues making room for someone your life can no longer accommodate. I had always thought of grief as the aftermath of love. Sitting in those rooms, I began to think of it differently. Grief is love’s reflection. Its remnants. Maybe even its evidence.

We tend to look for proof of love in beginnings: weddings, babies, anniversaries, photographs of people with their arms around one another. But there is another kind of proof at the end. There is something extraordinary about witnessing how much love remains after the person receiving it is gone.

I went to the grief group because my mother had died. I knew why I was there. Then I went to a divorce group. I went there because I thought I might be able to help.

My parents’ divorce lasted nearly six years. It was a high-conflict divorce, the longest-running case our mediator told us he had ever mediated. I spent those years beside my mother, helping her navigate something I don’t think either of us understood when it began. I watched the machinery of a long and high-conflict divorce up close: lawyers, accountants, mediators, judges, documents, proposals, counterproposals, numbers, delays, adjournments, negotiations, disappointments, small victories followed almost immediately by another problem.

When my mother died, I desperately wanted something useful to come from all of it. I thought perhaps I could give another woman some of what I had tried to give my mother. Maybe everything I had learned could become useful to somebody. If I could help another woman, perhaps some meaning could come from my mother’s pain. So I sat in on a divorce support group. And then I sat in on another.

I wasn’t divorced. I had never been married. The women were different ages. Their marriages were different. Their financial circumstances were different. Some had children and custody battles. Some were terrified about money. Others had money and were discovering that money did surprisingly little to protect them from the emotional brutality of the process. Some had been married for decades. Others hadn’t. Their lives looked nothing like mine, and yet I recognized them almost immediately.

I recognized the way divorce had colonized their minds.

Unless you have lived through a high-conflict divorce, I don’t know if it is possible to explain how completely it can consume a life. There are all kinds of divorces. Some people sit at a kitchen table and divide their belongings. Some hire a mediator and preserve something resembling friendship. Some fight for a while and eventually exhaust themselves into compromise. And then there are divorces that become ecosystems.

Eventually, the divorce begins to organize your entire life. You check your phone before you have fully opened your eyes. Did the lawyer write? Did the accountant respond? Did the other side send the documents? Did something happen overnight? There are emails you are afraid to open and emails you are desperate to receive. A phone call can change the temperature of an entire day. You learn to recognize certain names on your screen and feel your body react before you’ve even answered.

You wait for proposals. You prepare for meetings that get postponed. You spend days anticipating conversations that last twenty minutes and twenty minutes having conversations that affect the next six months. You become suspicious of silence. You become suspicious of movement. Over time, I lost much of my faith in the idea that Family Court would impose order on the chaos. Things I assumed would bring immediate consequences often didn’t. Deadlines passed. Documents weren’t produced. Orders sometimes seemed to require more orders to be enforced. What I had imagined as a system designed to bring a dispute toward resolution often seemed capable of sustaining the dispute itself.

Good news is rarely simply good news because you immediately begin wondering what it means for everything else. You stop believing anything is finished until it is signed, and eventually you stop believing signatures mean things are finished either. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, you’re supposed to continue being a person. But part of your brain is always somewhere else.

That was what I recognized in the women in the divorce group. The hyper-vigilance. The anxiety. The endless replaying of conversations. The obsession with what the other person might do next. The desperate desire to be finished. The fantasy that there would eventually be a morning when you woke up and none of it would be the first thing you thought about. I had believed the circumstances of my parents’ divorce were unusual enough to make my experience unusual. Sitting with those women, I began to understand that the circumstances could be entirely different and the exhaustion remarkably similar.

Early in my parents’ divorce, my relationship with my father began to change. There wasn’t one dramatic moment when I stopped being simply his daughter. It was more functional than that. My mother had begun separating herself from her husband, and somewhere along the way, I began separating my father from the man we were negotiating against. Maybe I had to. It is very difficult to negotiate against your father. It is easier to negotiate against a position.

So I learned to separate the two.

My father is very good at negotiation. He had more than forty years of experience on my mother and me. He understood leverage, timing, and the enormous advantage of being willing to wait. He knew that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is nothing at all. He could tolerate a stalemate longer than almost anyone else could tolerate being in one. I had grown up knowing my father was successful in business. I knew he was a good negotiator, that he could read people, that he knew when to push and when not to.

There is something disorienting about discovering your parent’s professional strengths from the other side of the table. There is something even more disorienting about discovering some of those strengths in yourself. I learned patience because sometimes he wouldn’t move. I learned that doing nothing could itself be a move. I learned that wanting something too visibly could weaken your position. I learned that people don’t always respond to what is fair; they respond to incentives, pressure, fear, pride, timing and leverage. I learned how to stay at a table I desperately wanted to leave.

There are things our parents teach us intentionally, and then there are the things they teach us simply by being who they are. I can disagree profoundly with choices my father made and still recognize what I learned from being on the receiving end of them. Maybe that’s another uncomfortable part of growing up: realizing that what we inherit from our parents isn’t limited to the qualities we admire.

It would be easy to say that my brother and I were caught in the middle of our parents’ divorce. We were. But by the end, “caught in the middle” no longer described my position. I was on the Zooms. I was copied on the emails. I sat through mediations and participated in negotiations. I knew the proposals, the numbers, the positions, the strategy. My father knew I was there. I wasn’t simply his daughter watching him negotiate with my mother anymore. I had become one of the people negotiating on her behalf.

This is how I came to know far more about equitable distribution than I ever wanted to know. After six years, equitable distribution may be the phrase I would most like to never hear again. Equitable sounds reassuringly like fair, until you spend enough time in Family Court to understand that the two are not necessarily the same thing. The law is trying to take a financial life two people built together and separate it back into two lives. From outside a marriage, this sounds almost orderly. From inside one, it can feel absurd. Debt, spending, assets, decisions, and choices made by one person become part of the economic reality both people are left to untangle. I learned that what the law considers equitable and what a human being experiences as fair can live very far apart.

I spent a lot of those six years trying to figure out what my parents actually wanted from each other. You would think that after six years of lawyers, mediators, proposals, counterproposals, and an astonishing amount of money, this would have been obvious. It was not.

My mother wanted it over. By then she was sick, which made another three months of negotiations considerably less theoretical.

My father was harder for me to understand. I knew what his positions were. I knew what he would agree to and what he wouldn’t. What I never entirely knew was what ending the marriage meant to him.

Eventually I understood that they weren’t only negotiating over money and property. They were trying to dismantle a life they had spent more than forty-eight years constructing. Houses can be valued. Bank accounts can be divided. Forty-eight years is considerably less straightforward.

My mother died before the divorce was finalized. They had reached an agreement by March 2026, but technically, my parents were still married.

This was an extraordinary outcome considering how much of my life had been devoted to their divorce. For six years, I had talked about almost nothing else. There were divorce lawyers, divorce mediators, divorce judges, divorce accountants, divorce proposals and divorce bills. Especially divorce bills. I had learned the meaning of equitable distribution despite never having had anything personally to distribute equitably. We had spent six years and an astonishing amount of money getting my parents divorced.

They never got divorced.

In the end, six years of divorce proceedings were resolved by the one circumstance no one had been negotiating for. In July, I signed on my mother’s behalf to dismiss the case. After six years of trying to make my father my mother’s ex-husband, her death made him her widower instead.

For most of those six years, I thought about what the divorce was doing to my mother. I rarely considered what it was doing to me.

Then I went to the divorce group.

I had gone because I thought I might be useful. After six years, I certainly had the résumé. I knew the terminology. I knew the process. I knew what it was like to wait for an email capable of ruining an otherwise perfectly acceptable Tuesday. I thought perhaps I could save someone else a little trouble.

After two sessions, I wrote to the coordinator and told her I wasn’t ready to help anyone.

I needed the group.

I had already joined a grief group because my mother had died. One support group seemed like quite enough. Now I was moving between two rooms I had assumed had almost nothing to do with each other.

In one room, everyone was grieving someone who was dead. In the other, everyone was grieving people who were very much alive.

The distinction turned out to be less useful than I expected.

The women in the divorce group were grieving their marriages, but also the futures they had assumed would happen and the people they had once believed they knew. Nobody had died. This did not prevent there from being a loss.

I knew something about this too.

My father was still here. He was still my father. But six years inside my parents’ divorce had made being his daughter considerably more complicated.

My mother presented the opposite problem. For six years, so much of my life had been spent helping her. When she died, there was still so much to do. The difference was that she was no longer there for any of it.

I had gone to the divorce group thinking perhaps I could make some of what I had learned useful to somebody else. Instead, I discovered that I was sitting in the chair beside them.

That was what the two rooms finally had in common. In the grief group, I was learning what remains when the person is gone. In the divorce group, I was learning what remains when the person is still here.