All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [36]
I finally phoned, telling her I was heading home. I don’t remember her saying anything during that phone call (what could she have said?). Nevertheless, she met me at the airport, not the winsome-rag-pants-storytelling me, but the reeking-of-vomit-drunken me who could hardly breathe. My lungs were the first to be affected by those stretches of drinking; respiratory problems were consistently a part of my withdrawals. In that particular scene I had such difficulty breathing that she rushed me to the ER at Ochsner Hospital. After sufficient time to dry out, I was released with some meds and sent home. A few days later I was back on a plane, headed to my next speaking engagement and another round of Brennan Manning’s Ringolevio.
Marriage by definition involves two people, not one. There are always two sides to every story, and the truth often hovers somewhere between the two. Roslyn had angels and demons she wrestled with, just like I did. I don’t believe there was some singular moment when we realized things were ugly. It was a progression, a gradual accretion, a number of moments between a 1 and a 4 that if marriage was a formula might result in a 5. But marriage, like life I believe, is not an equation. Sometimes things just don’t add up.
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
Adrienne Rich, “In Those Years”
We were married for sixteen years, and then we separated in 1998. After a year, we tried to reunite, but it was obvious that the tissue of our marriage was fatally scarred, the damage was done, and we were both pretty numb. A year later, in 2000, our divorce was final. Including those seven years of kissy-face and huggy-bear before marriage, Roslyn and I were together for a total of twenty-five years. And then we were not.
Me, Roslyn, my sister-in-law, Celie, and my brother, Rob
15
To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
To love what is mortal;
To hold it against your bones knowing your life depends on it;
And, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.1
Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods”
I didn’t know how to be married, but following our divorce, I discovered I didn’t know how not to be married. So maybe I did know and just didn’t know it. There I go, in my head again, intellectualizing a matter of the heart. But nowadays, those semantic puzzles make my brain hurt, and they do little to honor the thread of grace that runs through our relationships and our attempts, however feeble, to love one another. So what remained after our marriage ended? We did, I guess.
I can see something in my mind’s eye, though, a scarred image that both gnaws at me and calms me. I see flowers.
I think of Paul Harding’s Tinkers:
The field was an abandoned lot. The remnants of an old house, long since fallen into ruin, stood at the back of the field. The flowers must have been the latest generation of perennials, whose ancestors were first planted by a woman who lived in the ruins when the ruins were a raw, unpainted house inhabited by herself and a smoky, serious husband and perhaps a pair of silent, serious daughters, and the flowers were an act of resistance against the raw, bare lot with its raw house sticking up from the raw earth like an act of sheer, inevitable, necessary madness because human beings have to live somewhere and in something.… So the flowers were maybe a balm or, if not a balm, some sort of gesture signifying the balm she would apply were it in her power to offer redress.2
Notes
1 Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods,” New and Selected Poems (Boston, Beacon,