Sunday, September 10, 2006
Consider the Possibilities, or Don't
In 1990 I was quite happily married. I was sure I'd found the love of my life and that made me very happy, very content. My life wasn't perfect in 1990, far from it, but I had the one thing that truely mattered.
While married we had a sort of different living arrangement. My job kept me in Sioux Falls year round. Hers required her to work in the field in the summers. So from late May to sometime in August or September, I was sort of on my own. I think back on that time, I was a male in my mid twenties, women generally seemed to like me and I lived alone in an apartment that made me look like a guy who was doing quite well. My friends would sometimes remark that I could be fooling around and the wife would never know.
That's just not the kind of guy I am. I was married, happily married, and while I still had the urges that guys get while we were apart, I never acted on them. In a way, that probably made me more attractive to single women since I didn't project a desperate vibe the way I did after the divorce was final.
One summer night in 1990 I got a phone call. The wife had been in a car accident in Chamberlain, on the Missouri River. I got in the car to retrive her as she couldn't travel any more with the car in the condition it was.
I jumped in the car. Needing to gas up first, I hit a local convenience store. I wasn't thinking completely straight, and wanting to do something for her, I bought a bottle of her favorite soda. I still had over two hours to drive, buying that was pretty dumb, but I was basically in shock. I didn't really know what I was doing at that point.
When I got to Chamberlain, I picked her up at the police station. I gave her the warm soda and we loaded her belonings into my car. She told me the details of the wreck on the drive back to Sioux Falls.
She was coming east on I-90. At Chamberlain, the Interstate crosses the Missouri River. It was raining. The Honda Civic she was driving hydroplaned, getting sideways on the bridge and she was broadsided by an SUV, spun a couple of times and hit the guard rail where the car finally came to rest. She remarked at how safe she felt in the car, but I was shocked. The car could have easily ended up in the river.
I later saw the car as she headed back out west for work. We had to get everything out of the Civic as it had been totalled by the insurance company and was being taken off to a junk yard. The car was a mess, and I started thinking about how things could have turned out differently for the ex-wife. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how easily she could have ended up dead in the accident. She could have been killed when the SUV plowed into the side of the Civic, the Civic could have ended up in the river, drowning her as the car sunk to the bottom.
I was quite thankful that she was OK. Even today, after everything that's transpired between us, I'm happy that she was OK.
In 1990 I was quite happily married, in 1991 I wasn't. It wasn't a banner year in our household. It's when things started to go wrong in our relationship. We took a pretty serious financial hit with the totalled car, the insurance not covering what we owed on it. Other bad financial things happened as well and in August of 1991 I lost my job at the shitty TV station I was working at. By September, the woman I fell in love with in college, the woman I had married less than three years earlier truely hated me. It was part of a horrible downward spiral for me.
In 1990 my ex-wife didn't die in a horrible car accident on a bridge over the Missouri River. I am truely glad that her life was spared that evening.
I had a cousin who died at about the same time. He was about to turn 18 and died when a truck he was driving overturned. That was over 15 years ago. When I think of him, I think of him as an 18 year old. I think of him as a kid with his life in front of him, with the hope only an 18 year old can have. I don't think of him as 30+ year old that he would be today, I don't think of the troubles that he may have had in his life over the years that have passed. He'll always be 18.
When I think of how my ex-wife might have died in 1990, I think of how much we were in love at the time, the hope we had in our lives. Things weren't perfect, but we were getting by. If she had died in 1990, I'd remember her as a woman who loved me, as a woman who I loved more than anything in my life. My memories wouldn't be of the petty arguments over money and sex we had in 1991. I would be sure that I'd lost the one true love in my life. Maybe I'd have recovered from that, maybe I wouldn't have. If she'd have died, I'd still be in love with her today.
In a way that would be easier, I'd have to deal with loss, not failure. I wouldn't have to look in the mirror and try to figure out what I could have done differently, how we should have sought help, how I should have accepted help.
I suppose considering these kind of things is kind of pointless. Life took the turns for me that it did. I'm where I am now, good or bad, because of everything that's happened in my life up to this point.
It doesn't matter whether I'm pining over a dead wife or lamenting the bad choices (by both of us) that made us have to split up. What matters is that I'm living life as it's come to me. I'm living today. I'm doing the best with the cards dealt me.
It's still not perfect, but I'm getting by.
BOJ
While married we had a sort of different living arrangement. My job kept me in Sioux Falls year round. Hers required her to work in the field in the summers. So from late May to sometime in August or September, I was sort of on my own. I think back on that time, I was a male in my mid twenties, women generally seemed to like me and I lived alone in an apartment that made me look like a guy who was doing quite well. My friends would sometimes remark that I could be fooling around and the wife would never know.
That's just not the kind of guy I am. I was married, happily married, and while I still had the urges that guys get while we were apart, I never acted on them. In a way, that probably made me more attractive to single women since I didn't project a desperate vibe the way I did after the divorce was final.
One summer night in 1990 I got a phone call. The wife had been in a car accident in Chamberlain, on the Missouri River. I got in the car to retrive her as she couldn't travel any more with the car in the condition it was.
I jumped in the car. Needing to gas up first, I hit a local convenience store. I wasn't thinking completely straight, and wanting to do something for her, I bought a bottle of her favorite soda. I still had over two hours to drive, buying that was pretty dumb, but I was basically in shock. I didn't really know what I was doing at that point.
When I got to Chamberlain, I picked her up at the police station. I gave her the warm soda and we loaded her belonings into my car. She told me the details of the wreck on the drive back to Sioux Falls.
She was coming east on I-90. At Chamberlain, the Interstate crosses the Missouri River. It was raining. The Honda Civic she was driving hydroplaned, getting sideways on the bridge and she was broadsided by an SUV, spun a couple of times and hit the guard rail where the car finally came to rest. She remarked at how safe she felt in the car, but I was shocked. The car could have easily ended up in the river.
I later saw the car as she headed back out west for work. We had to get everything out of the Civic as it had been totalled by the insurance company and was being taken off to a junk yard. The car was a mess, and I started thinking about how things could have turned out differently for the ex-wife. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how easily she could have ended up dead in the accident. She could have been killed when the SUV plowed into the side of the Civic, the Civic could have ended up in the river, drowning her as the car sunk to the bottom.
I was quite thankful that she was OK. Even today, after everything that's transpired between us, I'm happy that she was OK.
In 1990 I was quite happily married, in 1991 I wasn't. It wasn't a banner year in our household. It's when things started to go wrong in our relationship. We took a pretty serious financial hit with the totalled car, the insurance not covering what we owed on it. Other bad financial things happened as well and in August of 1991 I lost my job at the shitty TV station I was working at. By September, the woman I fell in love with in college, the woman I had married less than three years earlier truely hated me. It was part of a horrible downward spiral for me.
In 1990 my ex-wife didn't die in a horrible car accident on a bridge over the Missouri River. I am truely glad that her life was spared that evening.
I had a cousin who died at about the same time. He was about to turn 18 and died when a truck he was driving overturned. That was over 15 years ago. When I think of him, I think of him as an 18 year old. I think of him as a kid with his life in front of him, with the hope only an 18 year old can have. I don't think of him as 30+ year old that he would be today, I don't think of the troubles that he may have had in his life over the years that have passed. He'll always be 18.
When I think of how my ex-wife might have died in 1990, I think of how much we were in love at the time, the hope we had in our lives. Things weren't perfect, but we were getting by. If she had died in 1990, I'd remember her as a woman who loved me, as a woman who I loved more than anything in my life. My memories wouldn't be of the petty arguments over money and sex we had in 1991. I would be sure that I'd lost the one true love in my life. Maybe I'd have recovered from that, maybe I wouldn't have. If she'd have died, I'd still be in love with her today.
In a way that would be easier, I'd have to deal with loss, not failure. I wouldn't have to look in the mirror and try to figure out what I could have done differently, how we should have sought help, how I should have accepted help.
I suppose considering these kind of things is kind of pointless. Life took the turns for me that it did. I'm where I am now, good or bad, because of everything that's happened in my life up to this point.
It doesn't matter whether I'm pining over a dead wife or lamenting the bad choices (by both of us) that made us have to split up. What matters is that I'm living life as it's come to me. I'm living today. I'm doing the best with the cards dealt me.
It's still not perfect, but I'm getting by.
BOJ
# posted by Blind Orange Julius @ 8:53 PM 
