The house was quiet, but it wasn’t peaceful. It was the heavy, suffocating silence of a room where someone used to be.
It had been six months since we lost Leo. The grief had split us down the middle like an earthquake. After our son died, we grieved differently.
I was a raw nerve. I spent my days in Leo’s room, smelling his pillows, sobbing until my throat was raw. I needed to feel the pain to honor it. I cried.
Mark, on the other hand, became a machine. He was the first one out the door in the morning and the last one home at night. He buried himself in spreadsheets and conference calls, building a fortress of busyness to keep the sadness out. He worked.
We were ghosts haunting the same hallway, passing each other without speaking. I thought we were just surviving. I thought we were treading water until we could find the shore together.
Then came the Tuesday morning that broke the stalemate.
I came downstairs to find a suitcase by the door. Mark was standing there, his back to me, looking out the window.
“Mark?” I asked, my voice trembling. “Do you have a business trip?”
He turned around. His eyes were red, but dry. He looked exhausted, not from work, but from the effort of holding himself together.
“No,” he said softly. “One day, he packed a bag.“.
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t do this anymore, Sarah,” he whispered. “I can’t be in this house. I can’t… I can’t be with you.”
I felt the floor drop out from under me. “With me? But… we’re all we have left. We have to lean on each other.”
He shook his head violently, as if physically shaking off the suggestion. He looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in months. And I saw terror in his eyes.
“‘Every time I look at you, I see him dying,’” he choked out.
I gasped. “Mark…”
“I see his eyes,” he continued, pointing at my face with a shaking hand. “I see his smile. I see the hospital room. I can’t escape it. ‘I can’t be happy with you,’” he confessed, his voice breaking. “‘You are the face of my tragedy.’“.
He wasn’t leaving because he stopped loving me. He was leaving because I was a walking mirror reflecting the worst moment of his life. My mere existence was a trigger he couldn’t disable.
He picked up his bag. He walked out the door, seeking a world where he could pretend the nightmare hadn’t happened. He divorced me to escape his own grief.
I stood in the doorway, watching him drive away. He got to run. He got to start over in a place where no one knew his name or his loss. But I couldn’t run. I couldn’t escape my own face. He left, leaving me to carry the loss of our child and our marriage alone. I realized then that I had become the keeper of our history, the designated mourner, left behind in the ruins of a life he had decided to demolish just so he could finally close his eyes and see nothing.
