Divorce Diaries, Log #4 - The Cancer

When my husband told me that he didn't love me anymore, it was like our marriage was being diagnosed with cancer. Except marriage cancer consists of emotional and financial stress, regret, fear, animosity, exhaustion, and resentment. It was a massive tumor on the marriage. I was scared, not just for myself, but for my children. Initially, I was in denial, shocked at the severity of the situation. I couldn't believe this was happening to me, but when we returned from vacation, I knew I was going to fight for the cure.

Over the next eight months, the cancer grew despite all my efforts to eradicate it. No treatment was working. It was an uphill battle for which there was ultimately no remedy because when your marriage gets cancer, you both have to work to banish it or it just keeps spreading. I fought, I fought hard. I tried to be the best wife, the most compassionate friend and lover, the perfect mother, the full-time working spouse helping to support the family. But nothing mattered. My husband was checked out of the marriage, the cancer was taking over his life and he was left with very little feeling or empathy for me. He was dead inside. He was waiting for the marriage to die.

I cried a lot in that final year trying to resuscitate my marriage.  Almost every single day. The disease was tortuous. Every time, I thought we were working things out, I found the cancer was back again. His resentment towards me grew and the cancer was weakening me. In the end, it seemed that he was waiting for me to give up on the marriage, so he could be free of his unhappiness. The more I tried, the more he hated me. But I couldn't help trying, I loved him. And I loved our family. So, as he gave up, I dug in. This only made him resent me even more. As his anger grew, he began to treat me like an unwanted, ungrateful, stranger in the marriage which turned me into a person I no longer recognized. I was beaten. The cancer had taken hold of him and their was no treatment left.

In the final months of our marriage, I felt defeated and sometimes a little crazy. I couldn't accept the fact that my family was broken. Then one day, almost eight months after the confession in Phoenix, I was paying my gas and electric bill online as I did every month for years, and I saw an additional bill for another residence. Immediately, I called my husband at the office thinking someone had hacked my account, and asked him if he new anything about this new bill. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. I was completely naive and blindsided. He said, "I got my own apartment."

He was actually leaving the marriage, me, and our unsuspecting children. I hung up the phone...angry. He tortured me with this cancerous marriage for months, unresponsive to any remedy, and then just gave up, gave in, no longer able to fight the cancer that had been growing inside the marriage for 12 years. Looking back now, I realize that the marriage was sick for a long time, but we never stopped to pay attention to it, and in the end, it was just too late to save. I told him if he wanted to leave, he could...and he did. April 2012.