‘I’ve got some bad news, Dave’ ~ April 3, 1997

David Heiller

I’ve got a friend from back home. I’ll call him Carl here. I’ve known him since eighth grade, when we shook hands over the line of scrimmage at football practice.

We became best friends in high school, and we kept that friendship through college, through the Peace Corps, and through my married life these past 17 years. He was best man at my wedding.

Carl struggled through one long relationship that didn’t work out. Then he met a woman that seemed right. They were happy together. They got married seven years ago, adopted a child, and bought two farms.

When Cindy and I would go to Brownsville to visit my mother, we would try to see them. They seemed like a happy family. You never know from a distance.

I called my friend last week to see if we could get together over Easter. We were going to Brownsville to see my mother.

The first words my friend spoke when he answered the phone stopped me short. “I’ve got some bad news, Dave. Mary and I are getting a divorce.”

For the next 20 minutes he told me what had happened. Infidelity. Mistrust. Differences of opinion on childrearing. Unforgiveness. Hardness of heart. Those are the broad terms that define what happened.

Carl narrowed down the problems when Cindy and I saw him in Brownsville on Saturday. We walked up a hill south of town, cut through hay fields, admired the broad river valley. Spotted a big tom turkey.

I needed to have the ground under my feet to hear Carl’s story. I needed to be moving, to hell me sort out the twists and turns that led to the end of Carl and Mary’s married life together.

It’s too complicated and inappropriate to sort out in this column. But I can say that all the dreams they shared have come apart. They had to sell both their farms. In the next couple months will come the worst part, the battle over custody of their son.

I feel profoundly sad for my friend. He is starting over, at age 43, both financially and emotionally.

Cindy and I have talked about Carl and Mary a lot. All our talk isn’t going to heal their lives. But it does help us see things in our own marriage that we could do better, and things that we have done right. We’ve steered through some of the sharp curves that threw our friends off the married way.

We are counting our blessings. It sounds crass but Carl’s divorce is making our relationship stronger. That’s the only silver lining I see.

It has reminded me of several things: The importance of working out small problems before they become bigger. The importance of being able to express yourself, the importance of listening, the importance of compromise and forgiveness.

These are lofty goals. They don’t work for everyone. But they work for us, if we work on them.

Divorce is everywhere. Two of my seven siblings have experienced it, and more are on the horizon.

No matter what slant you put on it, divorce is a sad occasion. The potential for a happy life together is lost, and the time together has essentially been wasted, except for the lessons learned, and they are hard lessons indeed.