250: What if a devastating truth only deepened the mystery?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I have never felt so utterly broken. Absolutely just lost out of time. It was just like everything stopped. The world stopped. And nothing made sense.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 250. What if a devastating truth only deepened the mystery?

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When I tell people about my background, I usually give them a thumbnail sketch that I grew up a skinny, effeminate, black gay boy in the South during the Reagan era. And I have the scars to prove it. I was the middle child in my family. I have an older brother, 12 years older than me, and a younger sister who's about 22 months younger than me.

I grew up in a loving family with parents who loved each other. They were married for 50 odd years. My dad was retired military. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. They met at church.

I was raised Baptist, and that was the source later on of some angst in my life about the time that I started to realize that I was different from most of the other little boys. I just didn't know what it was.

I think I was about in the second or third grade, and my school was doing a production of The Wizard of Oz. Of course, I grew up watching The Wizard of Oz on television, and I, just being full of the confidence of a second grader, told my teacher, "I can sing the song from The Wizard of Oz." So she said, "Okay, go ahead."

I did my best Judy Garland. And the kids in my class, after I finished, they laughed. But my teacher said, I want a couple of the other teachers to hear you. So I sang the song for three or four of the other teachers. And they said, you need to sing this for the music teacher.

And so I sang it for him. And I kid you not, Dorothy became Danny, and the ruby slippers became ruby sneakers, and I got the part. That, to me, was kind of a very early coming out. I didn't know that Judy Garland was a gay icon, and what's been a lifelong connection with that song.

But it sparked my interest in theater and in performing. That was when I decided I want to be a singer. Long story short, I'm not a professional singer. But that was the beginning of me taking a very different path.

It was a big discovery about myself that, "Oh, this is something that I can do, and something that I can do well enough that people will like it and want to hear it." So it was an early way of seeking acceptance and approval.

I was about 10 years old around the time I had my first real crush. And if I hadn't figured out how I was different, my peers had started figuring it out.

That was probably the first time I heard the word faggot. It took me a minute to figure out what it meant. And there was this one Latino boy who had these kind of beautiful grayish-brown eyes, and he stood up for me and would make the other kids stop picking on me and make them leave me alone. That just won my little fourth-grade heart.

The teasing and, I guess, outright bullying was something that I experienced really in middle school. After we moved, and I moved to a new school, there was a family across the street that had a teenage son. I think he was 16 or 17. That was really when I realized that I was having a physical attraction.

"Okay, I'm feeling something that I don't think most other boys my age are feeling."

Growing up in a religious family where half of my uncles and now most of my cousins were Baptist ministers, I was told the whole Sodom and Gomorrah story and that it was a sin. My parents tried to encourage me to do things that other boys did. My dad especially. I played with dolls. My sister had Barbie dolls.

Once I was sitting in our family room watching television. I was sitting on the floor and I had one of my sister's dolls and I was braiding her hair. And my dad was sitting on the couch and he just was looking at me and he had this concerned look on his face. He turned to my mom and gestured towards me and said, should he be doing that?

And they had a conversation about me, like I wasn't there. And my mom said, "Oh, it's fine. Maybe he'll have a daughter someday and he'll need to know how to do her hair." And my parents tried to influence that by getting me a Ken doll. I guess did that kind of encourage me to, I don't know, what?

I was such an avid reader. I started reading at an early age. As a matter of fact, I became a fixture in the school library. I learned very quickly that volunteering as a library aide meant that I would get to spend recess in the library.

And I remember exploring the shelves, and I remember one book that made such an impression on me called A Way of Love, A Way of Life, A Young Person's Guide to What It Means to Be Gay.

This would have to have been the early 80s. But there it was on this library shelf in my little southern hometown. And it just walked me through gay and lesbian history, adolescence and puberty, and all of the things that I was experiencing and feeling and explained it to me in the context that I was feeling.

I suddenly had an identity and something showing me, telling me, "This isn't something to be ashamed of. This is just who you are." And that I wasn't alone. You know, I had two realizations back to back. First, I realized I was gay. Then I looked around at my hometown and realized, "I gotta get the hell out of here."

I remember at recess, this kid named Gerald with glasses started in picking on me. And now I realize that he was doing that because I was an easy target. And that if he focused attention on me by picking on me, then he wouldn't get picked on.

He just kept poking me and asking me questions. At one point, he said, "So are you a faggot or what?" Something snapped in me, and I whipped around and I got right in his face and I said, "So what if I am?" And there was a moment of silence and a gasp. And after that, I was out. The bullying did not, of course, let up. It got worse.

I flunked out of PE because I refused to go into the locker room, because that was where I experienced the worst harassment. I would get pushed around, ganged up on. That was also the beginning of going through my first real experience of depression because of the sense of isolation that I felt.

When I would go home and I would try to tell my parents what I was experiencing and what the other kids were calling me, they would ask, well, you aren't, are you? And I knew what the quote-unquote right answer was. I bottled all of that up. That same school was where I got called a nigger for the first time by this girl who was upset that I wouldn't let her cut in front of me in line.

I was getting it from both sides. And I discovered that I could get support for that if I was harassed on that basis. I could tell a teacher, I could tell principal, and they would blast the other kids. But what I felt most of all was the homophobia. That was the overwhelming part of it.

I would come home angry and just frustrated, and I would go to my room and slam the door and stay in there until I calmed down. I would get so anxious about going to school that, you know, in the mornings I would almost make myself sick not wanting to go and face that again. That was like psychological warfare to me, and I was going into battle every day alone.

Two things happened. I came home one day and my mom heard me say that I wanted to take a gun to school and blow away the other kids and then use it on myself. The one thing that my parents did that was the best thing that they could have done for me at that time was that they put me in therapy.

I remember I walked into that first appointment, maybe 13, 12 or 13 at this point, and I looked at him and said, if we're going to work together, there's something you need to know about me. I'm gay, and I'm not here to change that. And I remember his exact words, let's just work on the whole person and let that part fall into place where it will.

And that was the first time that an adult said anything remotely close to, that's who you are, it's okay. That's a part of who you are, but you're a whole person. Around that time, halfway through the eighth grade, I was dreading having to go to the high school that I was zoned for.

It was a big football school, and I just knew that whatever I was experiencing was only going to get worse. It was around that time that I saw a news program about a fine arts magnet school. So I convinced my parents to let me apply and to audition for this school.

I went in to my audition, and I did a drama audition. I had a voice audition. And just like that, it was like a fairy godmother waved a wand and zipped me away from the hell that I was experiencing. So in the middle of the eighth grade, I switched to this fine arts magnet school. I wasn't an odd person out.

There was no football. There was no basketball. Instead of PE, we had dance classes, ballet, jazz, modern. It was a whole new world, one where I felt I belonged, I fit in, we were all creative. I wasn't getting bullied anymore. I found friends that I could come out to and who accepted me.

By the end of my senior year, I was kind of one of the cool kids in the school. That was kind of a saving grace, and it made me who I am. After high school, my goal was to get as far out of town as I could.

Finally somewhere where I could be out and be open. I went to a public state university in a college town about a hundred miles from my hometown, which was at that point as far as I could get. That's where I really came out. There was a gay and lesbian student group. I joined it.

Before I graduated, I was co-director of the Gay and Lesbian Student Group. We successfully lobbied the University Council to pass a non-discrimination policy on sexual orientation. I was a columnist for the student paper. I came out in my first column. That was another turning point. I finally had a community.

I started drinking in high school, and by the time I got to college, it was a problem. I would drink to the point of blacking out. I would drink and drive. I remember one night in particular, I was hanging out with some friends of mine watching a movie. We opened a bottle of wine. They each had one glass, and I finished the bottle.

And afterwards, I was going to a keg party with another friend of mine, and I continued to drink there. And I remember getting in the car to go home and realizing, I cannot be driving this car. That is the last thing I remember before coming to my parking space where I was staying.

And I went inside, went into the bathroom, and immediately threw up and realized I needed help. That turned out to be my first AA meeting, and that was the beginning of my getting sober. And I've been sober for 30 years.

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After college, after I graduated, my dating life was almost non-existent until I started going out with this guy who was living in the city where I was trying to move to to get a job.

At that point, I had not really had a relationship, and so I was a wreck. I probably came on way too strong, because we dated for about a week, and

And then he broke up with me and I had my first breakup experience. But in the process of going to the city and interviewing, I ran into the person from the National Gay Organization. They gave me their card and said, "There may be something for you at the national level." And they offered me the job. I had been in this major city for about eight or nine years.

I had friends. I had an active social life. I had dated a handful of guys. And I wanted to be in a relationship

I was about 30 or 31, right around 2000. And part of my gay urban experience involved being on AOL because there were chat rooms where guys would meet each other. And that's where I met my husband. We met for coffee, and that was the beginning.

It was bumpy in the beginning. He was coming out of a relationship, and I would find out later that he was also dealing with discovering that he was HIV positive. We went out for about a month, and then he dumped me. He had just tested positive, and I think he was just dealing with a lot of things being in a state of flux at the time.

And I decided, you know what, I'm going to leave this door open. Shortly after that, we went out to dinner again. Eddie leaned in and kissed me. And that's really kind of where we started. He revealed to me that he was HIV positive. I was and remain negative.

But it wasn't a big thing to me because I had always been involved in HIV/AIDS activism. I was working for an AIDS organization at the time, and so I was very well educated about it. And when he told me, I told him, "Well, whatever comes with that, we'll face it together."

We dated about a year, and then we moved into our first house together. And around that time, he had a conference in Hawaii, and we decided to make a vacation of it. And he very romantically proposed to me on a beach in Hawaii and surprised me with a ring. That, for me, was literally when we became married to each other.

I knew that he wanted a family, he wanted children. He said it in his profile, and I wanted that kind of partnership. So after we were together for about a couple of years, we started the adoption process and adopted our oldest firstborn son about five years after we adopted our second son. With that, our family was complete.

When our youngest was about two years old, we were able to get legally married and have it recognized in our state. And that turned out to be a big deal. We were one of the first same-sex couples in our city to get legally married.

We moved a little bit of a ways out to the suburbs and found a very accepting community. We had great neighbors. Schools were very supporting and accepting. Life was just work and family and taekwondo lessons and diving classes. And we had a good life.

Really, it was the kind of life that I had grown up not thinking would be possible. Fast forward to 2016, our kids are now 14 and 9 years old. I had just been laid off from the job that I'd had for almost 10 years. There was a merger, and in the merger I was made redundant.

All of a sudden, that part of my identity and my life was gone, and I was figuring out what to do. I was just starting a job search, and this was December of 2016. My husband had just turned 50. He was a few years older than me.

We had our usual Christmas with the kids. And five days after Christmas, the 30th of December, it was a Friday. I was at home with the kids, and he was at work. We talked on the phone around lunchtime, and he was calling to tell me to marinate some

that he was going to make for dinner. He would get off of work at about 5.30 and be home at his usual time, which would have been about 6.30 or 7. I was upstairs watching television in the family room. My youngest son was in the office on the computer, and my oldest was in the basement on the Xbox. I started looking at the clock, and 6 o'clock came and went. And 6.30...

came and went. And I started worrying because he would have been home by then. And I tried calling him, but I didn't get an answer. That didn't worry me much because he would only turn it on, a cell phone, when he was making a call or expecting a call. But I hadn't heard anything from him

And then it got to be around 7 o'clock, and now I'm really getting worried. I'm starting to wonder, do I need to start calling hospitals? Do I need to call the police, trying to figure out what to do? As I'm looking out at the window by the front door, I saw the light from someone's smartphone coming up the walk. And so I thought, oh, okay, he's home. The doorbell rang.

That struck me as odd because I'm like, well, he wouldn't ring the doorbell. He'd just come in. I opened the door, and there's a uniformed police officer standing there. And I immediately thought, oh, there's been an accident. Something's happened. He asked my name. Am I married to so-and-so? I said, yes. He said, is there somewhere we can talk privately?

I think at that point, part of me knew what the news was going to be. That it wasn't going to be good. I was hoping against hope that he would tell me there's been an accident. Your husband's in such and such hospital. You need to get over there. I walked him into the laundry room, the most private area I could think of. And I closed the door. And that's when he told me that my husband had passed away.

I remember that I screamed, "Oh God, no," and sank to my knees. And I'm absorbing this. Then I hear this knock on the laundry room door, and it's my youngest son, my nine-year-old. He saw me walk into the laundry room with the officer and he heard me scream. And he knocked on the door and asked if I was okay.

And I said, "Yes, it's okay. Just go sit back down. I will talk to you when I'm done here." I'm absorbing this, and I pull myself up off the floor, and I'm trying to make sense of what I've just heard, because it doesn't. I asked the officer, "How did this happen?" My husband was healthy. He took care of himself. I don't understand.

And that's when he said, "I'm sorry to have to tell you this way. He was with a friend with whom he has a casual relationship. And they were sniffing nail polish remover when your husband's heart stopped. The paramedics came. They managed to stabilize him enough to get him to the hospital.

They got his heart beating again, but they couldn't keep it beating. I can't describe the feeling at that point. It was like I was outside of my body and watching this happen. I'm hearing this, but I'm thinking, "This can't be. This can't be. Something is terribly wrong. There's got to be some kind of mistake. There's got to be some kind of mix-up. Where is he? Where's my husband?"

And he said, "Well, his body is on the way to the medical examiner's office in the Capitol. Because of the circumstances of his death, there had to be an autopsy." And this is Friday night, and he's telling me that I am going to need to contact a funeral home to receive my husband's body.

I walked him to the front door, and then I called my kids to me, and I broke the news to them, and we all just fell apart. The next day, I sent my oldest son over to the neighbors and started the process of calling my husband's family and my family and telling them the news through sobs.

I couldn't even process the circumstances that the detective told me about, because from the beginning of our relationship, we had agreed to be monogamous. And I just remember getting off the phone after calling our families, and I just stood in the middle of the house and screamed. It was just this primal thing that came out of me.

It was just this feeling of unreality. I don't know how many times in my head I kept saying, "This just can't be. It can't be. There has to be something else. This is wrong. This can't be true." I remember walking to my neighbor's house. I felt like I was walking through a lake of wet concrete.

I have never felt so utterly broken. Absolutely just lost out of time. It was just like everything stopped. The world stopped. And nothing made sense anymore.

Then, I don't know if it's a saving grace or not, all of a sudden there's a lot of stuff that has to be done. And at some point I realized I've got to retrieve the car somehow. I had to go to the apartment building where my husband was huffing nail polish remover with this friend with whom he had a casual relationship.

I found the car and I just remember looking around at the apartment complex and wondering, "What was he doing here?" It wasn't until that Monday that I learned what was going on because I had to call his office to tell them what happened. That's when his boss told me, "Well, he got off of work early that day and he had literally left the office right after I talked to him."

And I couldn't wrap my head around the whole huffing nail polish remover thing because my husband, he was a doctor. It made no sense to me that he would do that.

Then I thought, oh my god, a few months earlier, I was reaching into the back of the car to get grocery bags, and I uncovered this black canvas messenger bag from one of the conferences that he'd gone to. It had a bunch of papers in it, but then it also had this bottle of vodka and two shot glasses, and it made no sense to me.

And he said it was just something that had it in his office. And then I realized this has been going on for a long time. His boss brought out to the house boxes and boxes of stuff. And she asked me about the circumstances of his death, and I told her what I knew. And she said, okay, I have to show you something.

She went to her car and she came back and it was that damn black canvas bag. I looked at it. I remember there was a bottle of Viagra, some sex toys that we never used. There was a bottle of poppers. There was a pack of cigarettes. And my mind was reeling. That night I sat down and started going through the boxes and my husband wasn't the most tech-savvy person.

So when he had to go somewhere, he would print out the directions. He had saved a lot of these directions, and I started looking through them. Why is he going to a hotel on this day to this apartment building on another day? And I finally got to a set of directions to a local bathhouse where gay men go to have anonymous sex.

It was like if my life up to that point had been a three-legged stool, it suddenly lost two of the legs. I didn't know what to think. I was so angry. Even more so because if I had discovered that he was sleeping around while he was alive, I could have yelled at him. I could have asked why. But there was no one for me to ask why.

There's no one for me to yell at. There was no explanation. I'm in the midst of making funeral arrangements, at the same time wondering, who was I married to? Were the 16 years that we had together just a lie? Is that what I was doing for that part of my life?

I had lost someone that I loved deeply and that I had built a life with for 16 years that had just suddenly vanished, disappeared. I had not only lost the person that I loved, but I lost the relationships that I thought I had.

And I figured out that this had been going on for years. Suddenly, I was just kind of left with all of these questions. I keep saying there's an unreality. He's got to be somewhere. He's got to come home, and I'm going to get my questions answered, and this is going to get figured out. It wasn't real for me, though, until I saw his body.

The funeral home called and said that they had his body and that I could bring what I would want him to be buried in. So I went into the closet and I picked out his tuxedo from one of our wedding ceremonies. My brother went with me and they gave me a bag with my husband's clothing in it that he'd had on that day. They let me in to see him and he was in a casket.

just walking up and seeing him like that. I reached out and I stroked his hair and I started talking to him and I don't remember what I said. I think I kept saying, "I don't understand why. I don't understand what were you doing? Why didn't you just come home? All you had to do was come home."

I bent down to kiss him, and he was ice cold, and that's when I lost it. I just collapsed into my brother's arms, and I just remember saying over and over again, it's so hard. It's so hard. And my brother said, yeah, it's hard because you cared. It's hard because you loved him. There's no way for it not to be hard.

After that, I had nothing left in me. Then we had the funeral and the viewing. A lot of people from our community came to the viewing. When I told them that the kids were going to be at the viewing, they came and brought their kids because they thought it would help my kids to have their friends and peers around.

And it did, because they were able to view him, but then they were able to go off with their friends and be kids. I learned a lot about how kids grieve. It's different from adults. My youngest didn't necessarily understand. He was nine years old, and at the viewing he asked me, "Can Papa breathe in there?" I asked him, "Do you know what death means?"

And he shook his head, and I explained to him, and he absorbed that, and then went and played with his friends. Kids grieve very intensely, but it's also episodic. They don't deal with it all at once. After that, we had the funeral. The room was filled to capacity.

I felt supported through all of this by friends and family and community. Being from the South, I'm used to people bringing food to the house, and it was a comfort because all you can do almost is just put one foot in front of the other. But I still had to eat, and the kids still had to be fed. I had to keep going.

It wasn't until after the funeral that I started getting a few more answers. First, I got the death certificate with the cause of death, and it came down to something called myocardial fibrosis. It's a heart condition where the cells of the heart harden. In him, it was undetected.

That heart condition was aggravated by a couple of different things. One was amphetamine abuse. He was basically abusing ADHD medication and inhalants. And that led to his heart stopping. And because of the heart condition, he couldn't get it started and keep it going. So I had those answers. But I still didn't have the answers that I wanted or needed.

I tried different ways of getting those answers.

I went to the police station, and I realized they were probably protecting me by not giving me all of the information. They told me the address of the apartment complex, but they didn't tell me what building, they didn't tell me what apartment, because I'm sure they didn't want me going and banging on doors, which I can't say I wouldn't have done, because I still wanted somebody to yell at and to rage at.

I remember I went to his office to pick up something, and I just felt like I needed to make the same trip that he made. By that point, I knew where he had been. I knew what hospital he was taken to. And I drove the route that he would have driven that day.

Because I just needed to be in the places where he was. Because this was a chapter, an important chapter of my life that, in a sense, I wasn't in. I drove out to the apartment complex and I stood and I tried to figure out what building would it have been. And I still thought about knocking on doors, but I didn't know the apartment number. And in my heart, I knew nothing good would come of it.

There were just some answers that I wouldn't necessarily get even if he were alive. Because if I asked him why, he might not be able to tell me himself. I drove from there to the emergency room. I got into the emergency room waiting area. And I was as far as I could go. And I just stood by the doors that I knew he had been taken through when they brought him in. And when they took his body and brought his body back out.

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Eventually, I went into therapy again because I needed something. I had dedicated myself in that first year to making sure my kids were okay. And a lot of times, they were the only thing that kept me going. There are days when I wouldn't have gotten out of bed except that they needed me.

They'd already lost one parent. I was not going to have them lose another to grief. But after a year, I just decided that I needed a therapist. And I was fortunate that I found a very, very good therapist who helped me realize my strengths and remind me that I had not lost who I am. You know, people would say, you're doing such a wonderful job with your kids through all of this.

And my initial response was, what choice do I have? I don't have a choice. I have to. And my therapist pushed back on that and said, no, you do have a choice. You did have a choice. One of my neighbors said it to me too. She said, no, you could choose to lay down, but you're not. You're choosing to be there for your kids. You're choosing to be available there.

and helped me get from a point of saying I don't have a choice to being able to say that's who I am. I could have abandoned my children in a number of ways, but that's not who I am.

My kids don't know any of the circumstances behind his death because I didn't want to tarnish their memory of him. And I'm certainly not going to make them responsible for some aspect of my grief, which was a complicated grief because I had to struggle really hard to make peace with it.

I remember there was a day I was online and I was reading articles on grief. One was a column written by a woman who worked as a chaplain in a hospice. But she wrote about her honeymoon when she got married. And her husband casually mentioned that he would have to find a criminal defense attorney when they got home.

He explained that on the night of his bachelor party, he and his friends had basically gotten into a bar fight and that he'd spent the night in jail and a whole bunch of people worked together to keep that information from her on the wedding day. And she said at that moment, she burst into tears and said, our marriage is based on a lie.

She said it wasn't a lie, of course, it was just a lack of information. It was her job as a chaplain in which she spent much of her time listening to the secrets and revelations of people who were dying. And she realized none of us ever has all the information. None of us ever knows everything about the person that we're with. There will always be things unknown.

She listened to people tell her about their affairs, or a husband would tell him that he knew his eldest child wasn't his. Loving someone doesn't mean that you know everything about them. No matter how close you are to someone, we're always mysteries to each other. She realized, you know what, her marriage wasn't based on a lie. After that, I was bowled over.

The next article that I read was a piece written by a therapist. Esther Perel was her name. The article got my attention because of the title, "Why Happy People Cheat." She talked about people who were cheating on their spouses.

Not necessarily because they were unhappy in their relationship, not because they didn't love their spouse. Sometimes they didn't understand themselves why they were unhappy.

Sometimes it could be about self-discovery. Sometimes it could be connected to some issue about their childhood. That people can have affairs and infidelity and not have it be because they're unhappy in their relationship or because they love their partner any less.

It reminded me of something about my husband that I was only able to kind of think about and put together afterwards. A lot of his life was directed towards expectations.

He comes from a family of immigrants. His parents immigrated to the U.S. just before he was born. I think for him there was always a pressure to succeed, a pressure to achieve, a pressure to fit a certain image professionally and personally that was what drove him.

By the time he was established in his career, he was ready for a relationship, and that's when we got together. The next thing on the list would have been a family. We did that as well, and I think that he may have just been searching for something else, for some part of himself.

I remember him telling me about this professor or doctor who was kind of a mentor, and this doctor died of a heart attack. And the next thing anyone knew, three widows showed up. He was married to three different women, had three different households, three different families, and managed to juggle it all until he dropped dead.

And I just thought, that's not too far off from what my husband did, except the one comfort that I had was that with him, it was just sex. It reminds me of a meme that I came across. It just spoke to me and kind of helped me get some perspective. It says, you cannot move on until you accept this.

You will not receive closure in every situation, but you can create it for yourself. Most of what other people do is about them and not you. Some things cannot be explained. And it helped me to release the feeling that, was it me? Was I not enough?

He did what he did for reasons that have mainly to do with him. It wasn't because I wasn't enough. It wasn't because he didn't love me. He always came home to me. He always told me he loved me. I think he had achieved everything that he wanted to achieve, and I think he was just looking for something else that he couldn't name.

He was just trying to find himself outside of the box that he needed to fit into, that he needed to build around himself. And I was part of that box. Our marriage was part of that box. It took me back to the beginning of our relationship. I couldn't believe this person wanted me back.

Actually, at that time, I realized a pattern in my relationships that I always ended them. I felt flawed.

And I felt that if I let someone get close to me, they would discover all the ways in which I'm a mess and run for the hills. And also because I'm so flawed that if this person wants to be with me, my God, there must be something wrong with them.

He had his own issues that he was dealing with, that he was struggling with. And I've reached a place now where I can feel compassion for that. We were two imperfect people who found each other. It's hard for me to know if he had lived and I had found all of this out, if I would have forgiven him because I'm not the same person. Dealing with his sudden death was figuring out all over again who I am.

I couldn't go back to being the person I was before I met him because meeting him changed me. I can't go back to the person I was when I was with him because he's gone and losing him changed me.

One of the things that has kind of guided me is that sometime before we met, I got interested in and started studying Buddhism. And a big part of Buddhism as I understand it is making peace with uncertainty, having compassion for yourself and for others,

and learning how to sit with an experience, and to sit with feelings, to hold space for them, and to hold compassion for them, and to let them come and go. Some things can't be explained. There were a lot of unknowns during our marriage that became known all of a sudden.

Which, of course, led to more unknowns and unanswerable questions. But I'm able to have a kind of peace now. I can make peace with the fact that I don't have all the answers. I know I was loved. I know I loved him. I know what we had for 16 years. And I know that he always came home to me. I know enough now.

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