D-Day (It's Been Too Long...)

According to this blog, it's been 4 years and 6 days (counting today) since I've written anything. Like many other good things in my life which have fallen by the wayside during that time, more than 4 years between writing and posting is just too long. I'm certainly a little biased, but I'm not a bad writer, and re-reading some of my older posts makes clear to me that at least some of them served a therapeutic and healing purpose. I have no idea how often I'll write going forward, but I will probably do a little writing from time to time in the future, even if only to help get things straight in my head.

I am writing this post just before bedtime on Wednesday, October 29, 2014. Today was a day that will live in infamy...the day that no married person or couple should ever have to experience. At just after 10:30 A.M. this morning, the Honorable Philip Smith in the Fourth Circuit Court for Davidson County, Tennessee, granted me a divorce from Althea Penix, my wife of 6 years and 25 days, on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. Typing that sentence is absolutely heartbreaking beyond anything I can put into words. Divorce, while sometimes necessary, is an awful, excruciating process that I would not wish on my worst enemy.

I will likely have more to say on this topic in future scribblings, but for now, I'll just settle for trying to capture my feelings on such a life-changing day. Above all else, I wish more than anything Althea and I could have worked things out in a way where we both could have been happy and fulfilled in our marriage. For any number of reasons, that simply wasn't possible, and that's why today became necessary.

With that said, I am glad that the legal part of the divorce process is now over. Especially in the beginning, when it first became clear that our marriage was not going to survive, there were far too many angry and hurtful words spoken going both directions. While understandable given the circumstances, that didn't make the legal process any easier. As a fair-minded person, I genuinely try to give credit where it is due, and in this regard, Althea deserves some credit: notwithstanding the incredibly rocky and unfortunate beginning to the divorce process, she eventually did calm down enough to see that there is life after the legal process and the divorce, and that both of us would be better served (financially and otherwise) to come to a settlement agreement. She could have made the legal process much more painful and expensive, but she made a mature, logical decision not to do so, and it is to her everlasting credit that she made that choice.

In closing, I'll admit that I have been kind of all over the place emotionally today, and frankly, I expect that to continue for a while. The hopes and dreams that Althea and I started out to achieve as a married couple will never come to pass now, and that is unbelievably sad. Short of death itself, divorce is probably the second biggest loss and separation from love that we as humans can experience. Because divorce is a loss, it is only natural that the grieving process must occur in order to move on from that loss. The 5 most generally recognized stages of the grieving process are: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness/periodic depression, and acceptance. No one can say ahead of time when those stages will run their respective courses ahead of time. All I know is that I experienced some of all of these stages prior to and during the divorce process, and that I will certainly experience them again as the healing process unfolds.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life, and I look forward to seeing what it holds.

Marriage of Chris Whittaker and Althea Penix
October 4, 2008 through October 29, 2014 (R.I.P)