The first thing to understand is that it takes TWO people to keep a marriage together BUT only ONE person to bring about separation and divorce. If one spouse wants out, then the other spouse doesn’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter. The prospect of losing your partner can be a very distressing time, especially if it is NOT something YOU want to happen! Of course, if you are the one that’s had enough, then you are likely to be better informed and more prepared for it.
It’s when you are NOT expecting separation and divorce. That’s when you really can get caught on the wrong foot. Sometimes it seems to come “out of the blue” and when this happens, you can experience a sense of hurt, shock, disbelief, betrayal, fear, and anger – all at the same time (and by the way, “it’s okay to feel this way although you will need to find a way to manage these feelings)!
Sadly, a perfectly good marriage can break down through the loss of a child and one or both of the parents can’t seem to get past it. It happens and it’s no one’s fault. Good marriages are not immune from this sort of tragedy. One such example involved a young couple (let’s call them “David” and “Madeline”). Each of them had two children from previous marriages.
Now David and Madeline also had one child from their own marriage. She was a little girl, three and half year of age. We’ll call her “Mary”.
All five children lived happily together with them in a rented brick house. At the rear was another house occupied by a milk truck vendor and his family. The only access to this house was a common driveway running down the side of David and Madeline’s house. On the other side of this driveway) was a small shopping center with, amongst other things, a bakery.
There was a gap (for a gate that was never installed) in the high fence between the common boundary of the shopping center and the driveway. The children from both houses (with the exception of Mary who was not allowed because of her young age) regularly went to the shopping center by crossing the driveway and going through the gap in the fence – a shortcut few of us could resist.
On this day Madeline, a former hairdresser, was in the back of the house cutting her girlfriend’s hair. David was in the kitchen preparing the evening meal. It was late in the afternoon but still quite light.
David realized they were low on bread and asked one of the older children to slip across to the bakery and pick up a loaf. Mary asked her father if she could go with her older sister. David, who was busy cooking, relented and told Mary that she could go “just this once”.
Excited, Mary went off with her older sister – across the driveway and through the gap. A minute or two later Mary arrived back in the kitchen alone. Dad had forgotten to give the girls some money so they could pay for the bread and the older sister had sent Mary back to collect some from her father. David didn’t like the fact that Mary was by herself but she was so excited to get back to the bakery he handed her two dollars and told Mary to come straight back with her sister.
As Mary was running back across the driveway she was hit by the milk truck and died almost instantly.
In spite of counselling, David couldn’t cope with the loss of Mary and took to drugs. Madeline, on the other hand, turned to God for strength. In the midst of her own grief, she tried desperately to hold the marriage together. Sadly, David was “lost” to her and the marriage never recovered.
The main point here is that even good marriages are not immune. Great loss and sadness can affect each of us in different ways and bring about separation and divorce.
