IT’S DONE: I’VE FINALLY FINISHED moving my ex-husband’s belongings back into the large, cluttered farmhouse we used to share. He won’t be coming back, but his shirts once again weigh down the closet rack, his boxes of household gadgets and financial files clog the attic and basement, and the furniture that wouldn’t fit into the house now fills the third bay of the car barn.
Three years ago our marriage was ending. Corey and I had “outgrown” each other, shorthand for the malaise that had entered our marriage and despite our best efforts wouldn’t leave. We were still friends; we didn’t have big fights. All in all we’d had a pretty good marriage, and so we’d spent a lot of time discussing the necessity of divorcing.
We had our boys to consider—Evan, nine, and Cameron, thirteen—along with eighteen years of shared memories. And the idea of living apart unsettled us. When you’ve lived most of your adult life with someone else, you don’t know what you can and can’t do on your own anymore, what you can and can’t live without.
Neither of us, however, seemed able to muster enough imagination to see a happy future together. We were less husband and wife than tenants living in the same house.
Although we had a good partnership when it came to raising our children, we didn’t share much of anything else and didn’t want to. But when we did decide to end our marriage, we did so with one caveat.
One night, in discussing what might happen after the split, Corey and I found ourselves promising that we’d always watch each other’s backs. He had an especially concrete reason to worry: he had multiple sclerosis. Although the disease had progressed slowly, its unpredictability meant he could slide further downhill at any time.
“Listen,” I told him. “Worse comes to worst, we move you back here. You just come back.”
I don’t know why it was so easy for me to promise to hold a space for him in my life and for him to promise the same. Maybe we had decided we could keep some parts of our wedding vows after all.
When we finally did separate, Corey bought a little beach house twenty minutes away in West Haven, Connecticut, that seemed to say so much about what he wanted and what he’d chosen to leave behind. He’d always been a minimalist (in contrast with my penchant for cleaning out tag sales and relatives’ attics), and his new place, a clean-lined Cape, reflected his aesthetic. It had few surfaces to crowd with family memorabilia, a lot of room for his books, and the view of the water he’d always wanted.
I was happy for him, and I was happy for me, too, that once again I could be my messy and complicated self without apology. Even the kids seemed happier. Now they reveled in the time he was carving out for them: entire weekends and weeknights when it was just him and the boys.
Last Fourth of July, Cameron, Evan, and I were on our way back from a trip to Long Island when we decided to call Corey. His beach had a spectacular view of our region’s fireworks, an immense parabola of light running up and down the coasts of Connecticut and New York.
He was thrilled to hear from us; he was missing the boys, he said, and by coincidence was marinating way too much chicken. So we dropped by for dinner, and when darkness fell, we walked down to the beach for the show.
Instantly Corey and I fell into our old patterns with our sons, joking with them as we always had, making up stories, and laughing as we rarely did with anyone else.
But when the noise and light subsided, it was time to go home, which for us of course meant separate homes. We shared a history and children, but what we had did not quite add up to a marriage. And that was okay. That night we’d found a way of being together that worked for us and our kids.
The next Saturday, I dropped off the boys to spend a whole week with their dad, and then I took them again for dinner the next Monday night.
Wednesday was Parents’ Day at the boys’ camp, and Corey was supposed to join me there, but he never came. I figured something had come up and decided not to bother him. But when I got home, I found ten voice mail messages waiting. The first was from Corey’s sister, crying, asking me to call her right away.
Corey’s parents, I thought. Something’s happened to his parents.
The second message, however, was from the West Haven Police, saying they needed to speak to me immediately. I didn’t have to play any of the other messages. I never have.
Corey had died the morning before, alone in his little house, of a heart ailment no one knew he had.
In the sleepless nights that followed, questions tormented me: If we’d still been living in the same house, would I have been able to save him? Had divorce really been necessary? Might we have found a way back to our marriage after enough (too much) time being single?
I easily could have spent my waking hours obsessing over such questions, but I had to take care of our sons. And soon I realized I had to keep my promise to Corey.
True, I’d promised to move him back in with us if his health failed, but this wasn’t exactly what I’d bargained for. For starters, in the original plan he was alive, and my agonized decisions about what to keep or toss were to have been his to make, he who never agonized about anything. Second, it was hard to know how much to bring back of a man I had begun to extricate from my life. I’d been unraveling the threads of our joined lives, but now I was faced with having to pick up some of those stitches and weave the tapestry back together.
Back up on the wall went the family photos I’d taken down when Corey moved out. I reserved one bookshelf for his books, so the boys would know what he read. His CDs, too, got their own shelf near the stereo. I felt I had to restore his presence in our house. How else to show that he was once here? That he is, in some measure, still here?
There are hours of videotape, and someday I will edit them. But will I tell our sons the true story of our life (there are uneasy harbingers of the demise of our marriage in certain exchanges on those tapes), or will I decide to create a more easily digested version? This, too, is up to me and me alone.
Moving him home also involved closing up his beach house, dealing with his financial accounts, tracking down the far-flung friends who had no way of knowing he was gone, and otherwise wiping his life clean.
I thought it would be easier to incorporate his life back into ours if I took him home gradually, in carloads, over a period of weeks. And it was good I took the time and did it alone, because while packing I found things he might have preferred to keep boxed up: evidence of the girlfriend he hadn’t yet introduced to the boys, X-rated gifts from office pals.
Archivist that I am by nature, I considered each item for its possible historical value. Did it say anything significant about who Corey was? His girlfriend, after all, had been a big part of his life; it wasn’t right to expunge all evidence of her existence.
Last month I made my final trip to Corey’s house to clean it before the new owners took possession. I scrubbed the bathroom, the refrigerator, the floors, and the walls with an uncharacteristic thoroughness that would have made Corey laugh.
I sat one last time in the upstairs hall where he died and, as in the past, tried to imagine what he might have seen in his last moments. I like to think that he chose to fix his eye on an image to take with him as he went from this place to the next. If so, his eye might easily have caught the black-and-white photo just outside his office of our boys, then four and seven, dressed as pirates, eyes glaring at the photographer as if to say: Come at us with everything you have. We’re ready.
Of course they were just playing at it then.
I hope Corey was able to take that image with him. As much as I am keeping, I like to think he kept something, too.
I finished. Wiped the pared fingernails from the bathroom sink and silvery hairs from the shower. Rinsed a few errant parsley leaves from the vegetable crisper. Packed the handful of items I’d somehow missed: a flyswatter, hangers, socks.
I brought them back to our home, full to bursting with what was left of my ex-husband.
It has been a heartbreak and an honor to be Corey’s “one,” to have been, despite the failure of our marriage, the most important person in his life.
Yes, we were heading into our separate futures. Yes, he had a girlfriend who would probably have met the boys in due time. Yet in the end I was the one who went to sweep the corners clean, to save what was precious, and to close the door on his life. Don’t we all hope that when our time comes, we will have one such person left who will know what to do and feel privileged to do it?
Ten months after Corey’s death, the boys are moving on admirably with their lives, having perhaps inherited their father’s levelheadedness in such matters. And I have kept the promise I made to Corey back when we both thought he would live long enough to become infirm: I have brought him home.
Jennifer Just lives in Woodbridge, Connecticut. She is currently writing a book about her great-great-grandfather, George B. Swift, who became mayor of Chicago in 1893 after an assassination, two fistfights, and three votes. This essay appeared in June 2005.