Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.
Alissa’s husband died on October 10th, 2021. She made sure the following year was well-documented on Facebook, but hoped to one day abandon the platform while still leaving behind a digital footprint of her life for her children. Here you will find a brief introduction to her husband and family, the story of that terrible loss, her recovery, and a play-by-play of the people who joined her along the way. With authentic Facebook posts, personal journal entries, and photos, she takes her readers through that challenging first year. Then she invites us to laugh (and sometimes cry) as she moves on to juggle dating woes, major health setbacks, child rearing ridiculousness, and valiantly wields her sheer grit and determination in order to figure out how to be a satisfied single mom… in a world of “happy” couples.
One woman’s sunset is another woman’s sunrise.
I always thought of widows as “a slightly more tragic version of a divorcee,” for they have endured the unceasing form of abandonment. Death. With a divorce there is always a chance for a miracle, the hope of reconciliation, even if one partner swears they will never return. A widow may never escape on such wings of hope. Her reality is a permanent alteration that tears the fabric of her life in two. For her, there will only ever be her life in three phases: her life before him, her life after him, and that hazy wonder in the middle that was the time they spent together.
The few stars left below the seaward frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black cavern.
Alissa was 39 when she found herself sitting alone in the parking lot of a bar at 3am on a Saturday night. A closed kitchen had conspired to make “just one margarita” hit a whole lot harder than she had intended, and once she began drinking, she didn’t want to stop. The bartender was nice and just a little flirty. Sweet enough to earn a generous tip, but not so charming that it would appear he was disrespecting the ring on her left hand. She drank and laughed and listened to the music, while her husband and children slept soundly just a few miles away. Eventually the bar closed and she found herself shivering in the cold February air. Making her way to the family Honda that she had eased down the driveway just four short hours ago, she couldn’t quite remember why she’d left her warm bed. It had something to do with her husbands breath in her face, and how her skin crawled when his toes brushed her leg in the bed. What she did know was that thanks to having more than one drink too many, this car wasn’t going to be bringing her back to her warm bed anytime soon. She turned the key in the ignition and the car roared to life. Soon the warmth blowing in from the car’s engine began to thaw the winter’s chill on her bare skin. Why had she not thought to wear a coat?
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Utterly shocked at who could be calling her at this ungodly hour, she pulled it out and blinked at the screen. “Alaskan Man” flashed on the screen. She’d left him snoring soundly, having filled his belly with a wonderful home cooked meal, tucked all the kids in bed, satisfied his carnal appetite with the manner of marriage, and stayed beside him until his snoring was deep and even, she couldn’t imagine why he’d awakened.
She answered the phone and said “Hello?” She said it like Hello was her question, but really she was asking how mad was he… exactly?
“Where are you?” The voice on the phone demanded.
She looked around her. She knew right where she was, but if she told him, he’d be down there in minutes. She considered lying. She could say she had a friend in crisis, no she’d say she had gone to see her mother. It was no good. The truth wasn’t any worse than leaving in the middle of night to help an imaginary friend, and he know she’d never make the 75 minute drive to see her mother at such an odd hour.
“Downtown, in the parking lot behind the Matador” she told him honestly.
“Stay RIGHT there. Don’t you dare move” he said angrily, and hung up the phone.
She waited for him. When he pulled up, before he could get out and start interrogating her inside her warm car, and probably turn it into a two hour conversation she didn’t have the energy for, she hastened to exit the car and climb inside his cold truck cab.
“I’m taking you home” he told her, as if he’d briefly considered the movies or a dungeon torture chamber as alternate options. “Then tomorrow after church we are going to come back here and get your car.” He said the words “after church” as if they should never be said in a sentence in which one discusses picking up their wife’s car at 3pm, 12 hours after abandoning it behind a bar.
She nodded. They drove in silence and four minutes later they arrived home. Their roommate and small children were still fast asleep. She walked quickly to the bedroom they shared with their three children, who were all sleeping soundly in the “cave” she had made for them beneath their vaulted bed. In the darkness she took off her sweater and jeans and wiggled quickly into her pajamas, leaving her bra on, like armor to protect her. He liked to have sex when he felt like she “owed him” because she had “been out of line.” He was seldom concerned for her pleasure, even in the best of times, but he was none-to-gentle in circumstance like these and she didn’t want to risk giving him any ideas.
When he resumed snoring she pulled out her phone and searched again for Alcoholics Anonymous, this time she identified a local meeting about five miles away, in the opposite direction as the bar. Three hours later she snuck out of bed for a second time, left a note saying she’d “gone to an AA meeting,” and quietly closed and locked the door behind her.
She didn’t know it, as she drove in the dark of that first chilly morning, but she was about to begin something that would forever change her life, and the lives of her children. She’d been miserable for a long, long time. She didn’t know if drinking more than her pitiful liver could handle, multiple days per week, qualified her as an alcoholic, but she knew one thing: she couldn’t go to bars anymore to get away from him. She could pretend at church. It was a small price to pay for a roof over her head, food to eat, and the freedom of using the household checking account for her creature comforts.
Just as the meeting was starting, she slipped into a chair in the back and slouched low in her seat. It was 7am and her new life was about to begin.
The Violas had them in their ears as though invisible ghosts hovering about their chairs had consulted in mutters as to the advisability of setting fire to this foreigner’s casa.
“I’m Kennedy” whispered the trophy wife beside her. It was 7am and judging by her brand name, post work-out attire, she’d clearly already been to the gym before she made her way to this tidy church basement. “You new?” she asked. Alissa nodded as someone at the front of the room continued to read something in a monotone voice. She heard something about “Steps” being laid out and periodically the people in the room would all chime in as if reading from a script that hadn’t been handed out.
“What’s your D.O.C.?” Kennedy leaned in to ask.
Alissa shrugged. She didn’t even know if she had a DOC. She’d been raised in conservative Christian home, attended private school, married a good Christian boy at 25 and until a few months ago had seldom had more than one glass of wine in the same month. Let alone the three in a night, like she’d been drinking lately. “I don’t know what a D.O.C. is” she whispered back.
Kennedy hiccupped and stifled the sort of giggle Alissa would have expected from someone ten years younger than herself, but not someone ten years older. “Your D.O.C. is your Drug of Choice. Not everyone who comes here has a problem with alcohol. Some do drugs, others have problems with food, gambling, even porn and sex. All 12 step programs are interchangeable in their major similarities.”
Alissa thought of her husband and his raging porn addiction. He’d tried every Christian book, church counselor, accountability program and type of meeting imaginable but never kicked the habit. She wondered if he’d ever even been to an AA meeting.
“Alcohol” she said firmly. “I definitely drink to much.” She didn’t want her new friend mentally lumping her in with all those OTHER people, especially not the sex and drug addicts.
“Okay, me too. Lets talk after” Kennedy said.
The guy on her left handed her a clip board where it appeared the fifty other people in the room had scrawled their names and a random date. Some dates were decades old. Most were recent. One was two days before. Wasn’t this suppose to be “Alcoholics Anonymous?” She couldn’t wrap her head around the signing in thing. She just sat there, holding the pen and staring at the sheet of paper until the guy who had handed it to her leaned over and whispered “You don’t have to sign in. It’s just for people who want someone to check up on them if they don’t show up for awhile.”
Alissa wasn’t sure how she felt about getting a call from one of these people. Many seemed very normal, there were clearly some wealthy corporate executives and a few other trophy wives in the group. She recognized them by their good posture, solid eye contact and power smiles. Slouching around her in the back though, there were people with vacant eyes who didn’t seem to want to be there. She wasn’t sure she wanted any of them having her phone number. She clipped the pen to the top without signing and passed the clipboard to Kennedy, who signed it and passed it along.
“Crap. I have to dash” Kennedy told her after the meeting. “I need to get home and make breakfast for my kids. I forgot it’s Sunday and that means pancakes!” As her only friend in the room dashed out the door, Alissa noticed several coffee pots sitting on the back counter. One was labeled decaf and it perched next to a nearly empty box of donuts. Sugar. Now we were talking.
She made her way to the counter where she was greeted by a warm smile from a lady in her 50’s behind the counter. She was putting out more powdered coffee creamer and tossed a plastic Costco sized can of Folgers coffee into the trash. “The donuts are fresh, but the coffee is just like you’d expect.”
Alissa wasn’t sure what she’d expect to get for a dollar. A basket had gone around after the clipboard and Kennedy has whispered giving was optional, but most people gave a dollar, to cover coffee and cups. Alissa didn’t have a dollar, she hadn’t brought any cash at all. “I got you” Kennedy said, dropping two dollars in the basket.
She thought about having a cup, just for something to do. She very rarely drank coffee at home, mostly because she didn’t like the jittery feeling it gave her and Carl hated decaf. The thought had never occurred to her to brew a pot just for the joy of drinking it. Coffee was terrible, bitter stuff. She figured people drank it if they didn’t have enough sleep to function in their day. She was raising three children and even though she was homeschooling them, she very seldom found herself to groggy to teach third grade math or sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” or bake brownies.
She poured herself a cup of coffee and chose a small donut, then moved to the side so the massively tatoo’d girl behind her could refill her cup. When the girl was done she came and stood beside her and asked her in a bright, cheery voice how much time she had. Alissa figured she meant time to chat and shrugged “Probably 15 minutes. I need to get home and get the kids ready… for church.” The girl laughed and said “No I mean how long since you drank?” Suddenly nervous that maybe she wasn’t suppose to be here if she was still drinking Alissa counted backwards and said, “About six hours?”
Tatoo’d girl sobered and said “I’m glad you are here. Lets get you a one day coin.” She headed for a large file cabinet against the side wall and pulled out a fishing tackle box filled to the brim with carefully sorted coins.
“Uhh…. I didn’t bring any money…” Alissa hastened to explain she’d left home without her wallet. Tattoo’d Girl didn’t seem to hear her. “Do you have one to return?” she called over her shoulder as she opened the lid to the plastic box.
“Uh, no. I… never had one before.”
Tatoo’d Girl snatched a coin from the first slot and closed the box. “Is this your first meeting?” She asked, a smile returning to her face. Alissa nodded that it was. “Well here” she handed her the coin and said “This is a 24 hour coin. You don’t have to be done drinking for 24 hours. You can have a beer in the parking lot and then come in and take a 24 hour coin. It means you are starting fresh.”
Carl and Alissa sat on the front porch in the early April sunshine. “Tell me again why you are mad at them? You can just… let it all out” Carl waved his phone wildly as he leaned forward and thrust it in her face like it was a microphone.
Alissa didn’t hesitate. She eagerly unloaded a detailed account of her friend’s recent social failings into Carl’s phone. He seldom seemed to care what, or if, anything bothered her at all. The fact that he was even interested in this little dust-up with her two closest friends at church seemed like an anomaly in itself. Mandy and Damon were a great couple, and had really become faithful friends over the past year, but more to Alissa than Carl. Carl just seemed to tolerate them, so as he urged her to vent her frustrations, Alissa gave herself to the passionate narrative.
“Its not what they said, but how they said it. Like everything I have done for them was worth nothing. They made me feel like a social outcast from their precious group, like it was their click and I was just being allowed to hang around. They were just so snobby about the whole thing. I don’t even know what made them think they had the right!”
Carl pulled the phone back and tapped a few buttons on the screen and announced “There. I sent them what you said. Now they know how you really feel!”
Alissa looked at her husband, stunned. After almost 14 years of marriage she was used to his rather unconventional social skills and had learned to roll with the punches. She’d lost friends. Some relationships had been salvaged by her apologizing passionately for him and working to keep him away from the few friends she had left. Mandy and Damon never really interested Carl. He had cut out early on a recent family night in their camper, taking the family’s car and forcing Alissa to wait for him to return the next day. Mandy and Damon had of course been very nice about it, and Alissa and the kids had spent a cozy night on the pull out sofa. The didn’t understand that for Carl, if he wanted to go home and nobody else did, it was entirely reasonable for him to just leave, to fulfill his own desires. It was always about Carl’s preferences. And Carl preferred for Mandy and Damon to hear how Alissa felt, so she’d stop complaining about the situation.
At a marriage intensive, six years before, the clinical psychologist assigned to her had used their only private session to affirm that from her vantage point she felt like Alissa was doing just about everything right in the marriage. She wasn’t perfect and tended to assume the worst about Carl’s intentions and motives, but Carl had some real mental health issues that were never going to allow him to do his part to heal their relationship. In their private afternoon session, the therapist had used the entire time not as previously planned to focus on identifying Alissa’s weak points, but to help her learn to cope with Carls, because Carl she said, was never going to change.
“If he showed any sign of joy in your suffering, I would suspect he was a psychopath. As it is, he is so absolutely immune to your discomfort, so cold and uncompassionate to your very obvious deep emotional pain that he at least has to be on the spectrum. I would have to administer a diagnostic to know for sure, but I don’t think he can feel empathy. He has probably learned how to ACT empathetic, but when it comes right down to it, he doesn’t care about anybody’s feelings but his own.
Sending a secretly recorded voice text to someone’s friends without getting permission was just the sort of thing Carl would do, without even knowing what he’d done wrong.
“Are you serious? Tell me you are just kidding and you didn’t just send that!” Alissa pleaded.
Carl looked confused. “No, I sent it. Now they know how you feel and you don’t have to obsess about it anymore.”
He couldn’t even imagine her feeling anything but what he was feeling, and she knew that yelling at him or arguing to help him see his mistake would only cause a needless fight. She needed to have a drink and relax. She turned to walk into the house and pour a glass of wine, and remembered that she was sober now, had been for more than a month. She grabbed her keys instead and calmly said “Thank you for solving my problem. I am sure I wont hear from them again. I am going to a meeting.”
She found a meeting that was starting soon and walked in five minutes before it started. It was a small meeting and everyone seemed to know each other. Nobody stopped to say hello. Her sponsor Kennedy had told her “If nobody talks to you, its your responsibility to talk to someone else. I don’t care if they are young, old, short, tall, fat, skinny, you walk up to the closest person there alone and introduce yourself and ask them how they are doing. If nobody is alone, count to 100. If everyone is still chatting and ignoring you, then and only then do you have permission to leave.” She hadn’t yet made it past 50.
A younger guy with an ACDC shirt was sitting alone at the tables pushed together in the center of the room. She took a seat a couple empty chairs away and said “Is this your first time at this meeting?”
ACDC Shirt said it was his first time. He recently moved to the area and a new friend was speaking at the meeting. He’d come along for moral support and because this group apparently goes out for Pho afterwards.
“Are you a big fan of Pho” she asked.
“I spent a year in Vietnam, and I did get pretty attached to noodle soup. I’m always looking for the best Pho.”
“What were you doing in Vietnam?”
He laughed. “Drinking, mostly! Well I mean, I was in the Army. I was discharged but I still like the soup. My girlfriend doesn’t get it.
“Divorce is not an option, unless he leaves me. I’m the only one who has committed adultery.”
The therapist took Alissa’s hand in her’s and looked her squarely in the eye. “Do you really think if one of the disciples had walked in on a Pharisee looking at porn on smart phone that they wouldn’t have stoned the man? The Bible says if a man even looks at a woman with lust, he has already committed adultery in his heart. If he is ejaculating into a sock rather than a vagina, and the woman isn’t in the room, is it really remaining faithful to his wife?”
“I don’t know. I had several affairs. Never on purpose and always when I was hurting from his porn addiction, but the way I seen it I am the one who sinned.”
He sinned first. He lied to you, and hid his porn addiction until after your marriage, and even then he didn’t humbly confess. You caught him. He has been unfaithful to you hundreds, if not thousands, of times since then. From what I can tell, for all his saying ‘sorry’ he’s never really given it up.
Porn addiction causes all kinds of intimacy problems in a marriage, and because the addict is so focused on their own satisfaction, they can be completely oblivious to their partner’s needs. I see this all the time in my practice. You are responsible for your own sin, but who among us would judge a child for stealing an apple, when they are absolutely starving.
“Yes, but I wasn’t starving, not really. He has always been kind to me in public. Its only when we are at home that he lets himself slip and the contempt comes out. It’s not like he’s been abusive…”
Alissa’s therapist gave a knowing look. “Abuse takes many forms. In your private life, Carl has starved you of compassion and affection. Perhaps not even intentionally, he may not even be capable of genuine emotion and you don’t warrant “The Act” when you are home together. Either way, the result has been a very good show for everyone else, all while you have been alone in your own private hell. Most women would have ended things long ago. If you are determined to endure, then you will need to change your expectations.”
Nodding slowly, Alissa took a deep breath. “Will it get worse? It seems like he’s gotten worse over the years.”
“Porn, like any addiction, will get worse over time if nothing halts the progression. His contempt for you may or may not grow. If you stop nagging him about the porn, he will feel less resentful. As it is now, he blames you for standing in the way of his real desire: false intimacy with a sexual partner that expects nothing of him. Give up on trying to stop him from having that, and he may be willing to meet your needs from time to time, simply because it serves his purposes to have a sexually responsive wife.”
“I always respond to him. I’d have sex with him every day if it would just make him be kind to me. He just only cares about his video games, his work and of course porn. If he wants sex, I always say yes… because I have learned I suffer in some way or another… if I dare say no.”
The only sign of commercial activity within the harbour, visible from the beach of the Great Isabel, is the square blunt end of the wooden jetty which the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (the O.S.N. of familiar speech) had thrown over the shallow part of the bay soon after they had resolved to make of Sulaco one of their ports of call for the Republic of Costaguana. The State possesses several harbours on its long seaboard, but except Cayta, an important place, all are either small and inconvenient inlets in an iron-bound coast—like Esmeralda, for instance, sixty miles to the south—or else mere open roadsteads exposed to the winds and fretted by the surf.
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Perhaps the very atmospheric conditions which had kept away the merchant fleets of bygone ages induced the O.S.N. Company to violate the sanctuary of peace sheltering the calm existence of Sulaco. The variable airs sporting lightly with the vast semicircle of waters within the head of Azuera could not baffle the steam power of their excellent fleet. Year after year the black hulls of their ships had gone up and down the coast, in and out, past Azuera, past the Isabels, past Punta Mala—disregarding everything but the tyranny of time. Their names, the names of all mythology, became the household words of a coast that had never been ruled by the gods of Olympus. The Juno was known only for her comfortable cabins amidships, the Saturn for the geniality of her captain and the painted and gilt luxuriousness of her saloon, whereas the Ganymede was fitted out mainly for cattle transport, and to be avoided by coastwise passengers. The humblest Indian in the obscurest village on the coast was familiar with the Cerberus, a little black puffer without charm or living accommodation to speak of, whose mission was to creep inshore along the wooded beaches close to mighty ugly rocks, stopping obligingly before every cluster of huts to collect produce, down to three-pound parcels of indiarubber bound in a wrapper of dry grass.
And as they seldom failed to account for the smallest package, rarely lost a bullock, and had never drowned a single passenger, the name of the O.S.N. stood very high for trustworthiness. People declared that under the Company’s care their lives and property were safer on the water than in their own houses on shore.
It might have been said that there he was only protecting his own. From the first he had been admitted to live in the intimacy of the family of the hotel-keeper who was a countryman of his. Old Giorgio Viola, a Genoese with a shaggy white leonine head—often called simply “the Garibaldino” (as Mohammedans are called after their prophet)—was, to use Captain Mitchell’s own words, the “respectable married friend” by whose advice Nostromo had left his ship to try for a run of shore luck in Costaguana. The old man, full of scorn for the populace, as your austere republican so often is, had disregarded the preliminary sounds of trouble. He went on that day as usual pottering about the “casa” in his slippers, muttering angrily to himself his contempt of the non-political nature of the riot, and shrugging his shoulders. In the end he was taken unawares by the out-rush of the rabble. It was too late then to remove his family, and, indeed, where could he have run to with the portly Signora Teresa and two little girls on that great plain? So, barricading every opening, the old man sat down sternly in the middle of the darkened cafe with an old shot-gun on his knees. His wife sat on another chair by his side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of the calendar.
The old republican did not believe in saints, or in prayers, or in what he called “priest’s religion.” Liberty and Garibaldi were his divinities; but he tolerated “superstition” in women, preserving in these matters a lofty and silent attitude.
His two girls, the eldest fourteen, and the other two years younger, crouched on the sanded floor, on each side of the Signora Teresa, with their heads on their mother’s lap, both scared, but each in her own way, the dark-haired Linda indignant and angry, the fair Giselle, the younger, bewildered and resigned. The Patrona removed her arms, which embraced her daughters, for a moment to cross herself and wring her hands hurriedly. She moaned a little louder.
“Oh! Gian’ Battista, why art thou not here? Oh! why art thou not here?”
She was not then invoking the saint himself, but calling upon Nostromo, whose patron he was. And Giorgio, motionless on the chair by her side, would be provoked by these reproachful and distracted appeals.
“Peace, woman! Where’s the sense of it? There’s his duty,” he murmured in the dark; and she would retort, panting—
“Eh! I have no patience. Duty! What of the woman who has been like a mother to him? I bent my knee to him this morning; don’t you go out, Gian’ Battista—stop in the house, Battistino—look at those two little innocent children!”
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