8
Oct

Visible Cause, Hidden Effect

   Posted by: Michael Bernier   in Yesterday's Memories

Had my father lived, and had my parents stayed married, they would have celebrated their 49th wedding anniversary this week. But, sadly, neither of those events occurred. My parents made it about 18-1/2 years as a couple; their divorce became final about a month before I graduated from high school in 1980. Dad lived only eight more years after that, dying from cancer at the age of 57.

I don’t know the exact description used back then for the grounds of the divorce; these days, it would probably be called “irreconcilable differences” because they truly had a conflict between them that tore their marriage apart. I don’t know all the details, and I don’t want to know them; what I do know is my mother filed the papers and my father didn’t contest it, hoping she would change her mind and want to work out their differences…but it didn’t happen. He kept on hoping she would take him back for the better part of seven years. Finally he met another woman who he eventually married, and she cared for him as he became more ill in the months before his death.

I used to think that their divorce did not affect me very much; after all, I left home for college a few months later. Now, I’m not so sure.

I’ve been married for a little over 17 years, having celebrated an anniversary just last month. By all appearances, my marriage is on track to last much longer than my parents’ time together. Like my parents, my wife and I have had our differences, but so far there is nothing we haven’t been able to work out. Not too long ago, I was asked by a more-recently-married man what our “secret” was. “Just keep talking,” I told him. “Don’t clam up and walk away and hope things will fix themselves, because they won’t.” When I thought about it later, I realized that I had learned that lesson by watching my parents. Whenever he didn’t like what Mom was saying to him, Dad would simply close his mouth and walk out of the room; if he had stayed and kept talking, I believe he and Mom would have been better able to work out their differences. Who knows? Maybe they would have stayed married a few years longer, perhaps until he passed away.

I wonder how many other lessons I learned from my parents without realizing it?

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 8th, 2010 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Yesterday's Memories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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