Surviving the holidays with a broken heart

My heart was already broken before I ever stepped foot in the emergency room.

I’d spent most of my adult life convincing myself that making spaces really mattered—interior spaces in my home, gathering spaces for a wide-ranging community, healthy spaces inside of myself and my children and even friends suffering through tough times. 

And then a single email crushed me, like a bug underfoot—a single line in a single letter from my ex-wife’s divorce lawyer.

“As I have explained to my client, it is completely unreasonable for your client to expect spousal support after such a short marriage.”

My ex-wife and I had been together for 29 years, since our senior year in college.

It had been 24 years since we had celebrated a commitment ceremony and bought a home together. Almost two decades since we had started a family, and about a decade and a half since we had agreed that I would leave the workforce—where I was wildly unhappy, anxious, and depressed in every job I tried (now I would simply say disabled, but I didn’t have that language then)—and that instead I would contribute to our family and our community as a homemaker, mom, writer, and community volunteer.

This had become the central promise of our marriage and family; of all the many silences and things left unsaid, this had been spoken, explicit, clear, both in the marriage and upon the decision to amicably and mutually end it: that my work mattered. That it was valuable, even if it was not income-producing. That my work in our home and community made my ex-wife’s work as a high school English teacher possible every bit as much as her income and benefits made it possible for me to be at home.

But we had only been legally married for six years, and that marriage had only been legally recognized in our state for six months.

“As I have explained to my client, it is completely unreasonable for your client to expect spousal support after such a short marriage.”

Clearly I was susceptible to being crushed in this way. Suddenly it seemed obvious that the carefully constructed edifice I had built—that my life’s work mattered—was in fact a house of cards. In just one moment, my belief in the value of all the spaces I had designed and made, of all the “interior work” in my home, my family, my community, —it just collapsed. My belief in myself, in my work, in my own worth, fractured and lay in shards on the floor beside the copy machine in a suburban Staples where I stood, reading that line in that email on my phone.

Maybe it shouldn’t have shattered me. Maybe I should have understood that this was just a lawyerly parry to be expected in a divorce, even a supposedly “amicable” one. Maybe I should have known that this line in this letter was open to more interpretations than just the devastating one to which I was most susceptible.

But that’s the nature of trauma, isn’t it? Should has very little to do with it. Trauma doesn’t care how reasonable and sturdy you should be, it just comes at you, in a flash, and leaves you terrified and trembling in the wreckage of what you had believed before was sure and safe.

And maybe in time I could have gotten over the implications of that letter, the shock of it, the broken promises it carried. Maybe I could have held on to my belief that my life and my work as a homemaker—as a designer and maker of spaces—mattered.

Except that the denial of spousal support had very real, material, and devastating repercussions for my ability to make a new home for me and my kids. It brought to a screeching halt my efforts to secure a mortgage or even sign a lease. It meant I was not able to provide a safe space for my children, and that I would effectively lose physical custody of them for one brutal, traumatic year.

That letter, and my ex’s inexplicable and brutal strategy of silence and absence—including her refusal to honor our promises to our kids that we would continue to function as a family, always, no matter what—came just in time for the autumn and winter holidays. I was stunned to discover that I was uninvited from every family and community holiday tradition we had every observed, and that my former community was quite happy to see me go.

For several years, I frantically tried to create “new” traditions of my own, to make happy memories in my home-that-wasn’t-really-a-home … but of course those efforts mostly fell flat. And every autumn the shock of it all returned, like a pall that fell over my world just as the summer heat broke and the leaves began to fall from the trees.

This year, six years later, I began to see the pattern. In the past it had always crept up on me just as the seasons changed, but this year I saw it coming and took measures to notice, to regulate, to heal. I have largely come to accept—embrace, even—that quiet, unforced time together with my family is far more our style anyway. I never really liked the relentlessly social nature and busyness of our old family traditions, even while their sudden and inexplicable loss was a terrible shock.

This year, I believed, I was finally going to embrace a new way of doing the holidays. It would reflect all the healing I have done, and all I have spiraled back around to believing about the value of making and design, of home and interior spaces. We would have easy, cozy moments, on our own terms, and I would not compare our low-key observances with the much more dazzling, public festivities on the other side of their family.

I felt like I was finally free of the burden of grief that had broken open my heart every autumn for half a decade.

Then one Sunday this past October I was taking a walk with friends (friends! my very own friends!) and I became uncharacteristically short of breath. I chalked it up to a difficult summer of inactivity, of feeling trapped inside by gritty urban heat and noise. I guessed I had been more sedentary than I realized and vowed I would start taking the dogs for longer walks.

But then over the next few days, the breathlessness got worse. By Wednesday, I was short of breath just walking up the steps.

I was worried I was making a big deal out of nothing, but when I contacted my doctor, she immediately found time in her scheduled the very next day. As I sat in her examining room, huffing and puffing from the short walk from my car, I was still pretty sure I just needed to get a grip and exercise more.

Instead, my doctor told me my blood pressure was through the roof and sent me immediately to the hospital for a chest X-ray. As it turned out, the X-ray results were not concerning, but my doctor insisted that if the shortness of breath got any worse I was to go immediately to the emergency room.

It did get worse, but still I resisted. “It’s not that much worse,” I rationalized.

But my husband Joel and my good friend Adina insisted that I follow the doctor’s orders and get to the ER. Pronto. And they were right. Upon arrival, I was whisked into a triage room, given an EKG, and immediately admitted for a battery of tests.

I ended up staying for five days and left with a diagnosis of heart failure.

The first weeks of my illness were so confusing and scary. It came totally out of the blue—I have no risk factors for heart failure. Tests showed that on the one hand, I do not have any coronary artery disease, but that I do have a very poorly-functioning left ventricle. A healthy left ventricle fills with oxygenated blood from the lungs and then pushes between 50 to 70 percent of that blood out with each beat; this number is called the “ejection fraction.” My ejection fraction was between 20 and 25%, which is apparently alarmingly low. Within a few weeks I would be in the care of an excellent cardiac team, assured that effective treatments are available and that my prognosis is not as dire as my own initial research had led me to believe.

But in those first weeks of fear and confusion, I was very very afraid that I was dying. And soon.

All this, just in time for the holidays.

The holidays that I was going to do differently this year, remember? Because, you know, I was over all that grief. I had moved on. My broken heart had healed, dammit.

As it turns out, staring down ones own mortality—not just in theory, but coming face-to-face with the very real possibility that one’s heart might give out soon—well, apparently that can stir up a lot of old grief, can take one right back to those frantic days of needing to get this holiday thing perfect.

I totally reverted to my old desperate ways. We needed to bake cookies! And decorate the tree together! We needed a Very Special Holiday Meal, and Very Meaningful Holiday Gifts!

As it turns out, though, my kids are young adults now. They have their own homes and communities and emerging traditions—friendsgiving, white elephant parties, holiday concerts and fairs.

This is exactly as it should be.

At the same time, the life-saving medications I am now on have the short-term side effect of extreme fatigue. Not to mention the grief work of wrapping my head around going from being a quite healthy person my whole life to this new identity as someone with a very serious illness.

It’s been a lot.

In the end, the fatigue won out. The holiday confections all came from a local bakery. Our holiday dinner was Chinese take-out. My kids’ main gifts weren’t ordered on time for our family gift exchange. We got the tree up in its stand, but I was too tired to decorate with them, and instead we watched a movie.

I’m always preaching about rest and and Spiral Time. About embracing what emerges slowly, and trusting in connection and relationship, and resisting the demands of mainstream consumer culture and made-up trends and traditions. But it has been a lot more difficult to walk my talk than I care to admit. Especially when suddenly Time takes on new and frightening dimensions in the face of serious illness.

These holidays didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped back in September, when I recognized the usual cycle of autumnal trauma and took steps to regulate and heal. But it wasn’t as frantic and desperate as it might have been, as it has been all too often in the past.

Having all that grief stirred up again—but not being completely overwhelmed by it—has been (perhaps counterintuitively) very healing, actually. In the end, having to practice what I preach was very … restful. And lovely, actually. Oh, there were still some quite blue moments and several serious crying jags, but I am coming to trust that healing is possible. This holiday season has been mostly full of calm, quiet, and cozy spaces and moments together—interior spaces that I have designed and made, together with my family (and friends! I have friends!), and which, when I ditch all the hype and expectations, is actually how we prefer it.

It turns out my heart is both more and less broken than I thought it was. And yet, we have managed to survive another holiday season. I hope you have too.