When Leaving Saves a Life
By: Ashley Cleland
Tags: Relationships, Life Lessons, This Happened To Me, Women, Family

Creative Nonfiction Contest Winner

When Leaving Saves a Life

My mom left and saved my dad’s life.

Photo by Resi Kling on Unsplash

There was a lot about him that was 80% blocked for me.

A memory of standing between my dad’s anger and my younger brother. The words rising like black smoke, billowing up to our high ceilings. They were gone in the morning, but I still smell them on my clothes years later.

A loud conversation at a Longhorn Steakhouse that turned heads and reverberated through hushed whispers around us. He stormed out, more smoke enveloping me in words I can’t unhear. We drove separately home.

Somehow more painful, are the memories of the mornings.

He sat peacefully with a newspaper, a hot Earl Grey tea, and a hardboiled egg. While there was the occasional eye-roll-inducing lecture, our interactions were peaceful, clear-eyed, and familial.

Sometimes grief is not about what you’ve lost, but what you wish existed in the first place. A world where “Morning Dad” was just Dad.

My grief and anger about our relationship, about the way alcoholism turned Morning Dad into a swirling wildfire of chaos and hurt, is most of the time blocked. I carry it in my bones and release it at therapy once a month, slowly but surely healing each small fissure that held hot ashes in my bones.

It turns out one of his arteries was also 80% blocked.

The doctor told him if he hadn’t made such significant lifestyle changes in the past year, he’d be dead.

It was a routine check-up after some slight chest pain revealed the 80% blockage. If things had been different, they may not have found the blockage and he would have had a heart attack and died. This was especially likely given his consumption of alcohol and sedentary lifestyle until everything changed one year earlier.

It was my fed-up, finally-had-enough-of-burning-slowly-alive, mother who left that inspired the lifestyle changes. Like many people with an alcohol-dependent partner, she struggled with how to support him without enabling him. It is lonely to love someone who is struggling with alcoholism. Even lonelier to get their morning selves for just a few hours when your children have left the nest.

She finally left. She went scorched earth on their marriage, packed her things, and moved across town.

My dad woke up, drank a lot less, ate healthy food, and started up an old hobby of cycling. He started taking care of himself again. He dropped over 100 pounds, eyes became clear, and within months, her “Morning Husband” just became her husband. They reunited after a year of separation.

He relates more positively to the world and to me now. There are still ashes in my bones but no more fresh, black smoke sticking to my lungs and my heart. My mom leaving saved my relationship with my dad, I realize.

She left. In more ways than one, it saved his life.

When I left my husband this year, I worried it would literally kill him.

He relied on me for nearly everything. I feel partially to blame for his struggle to launch into adulthood and the ways in which I controlled and enabled. I wondered how he would take care of himself, if he did at all.

In our case, the fire that destroyed our marriage was about my deep desire to be with women. It had been burning within me for as long as I could remember. I couldn’t ignore the warmth that surged within me anymore. I felt so guilty that my fire burnt away four years of marriage into a pile of unrecognizable rubble.

But now I wonder, if someday I’ll see that leaving saved his life.

I know at least that I saved him from life with someone who couldn’t love him the way that he deserved. I hope someday he’ll see that.

Sometimes the fire that so powerfully changes your landscape in the blink of an eye is actually clearing your path. When the smoke clears, there’s pain and suffering but there’s also hope for a new beginning. Ashes to ashes.

I was always told marriage is about staying. For richer or for poorer. In good times and bad. If you love someone, you stay. No matter how bad it gets, no matter if it is incompatible with your knowing.

But my mom and I didn’t stay.

We learned something important.

There can be saving in the leaving.