It’s Complicated

M

arriage is a complicated institution. Recently, I read a book about a woman’s journey through her husband’s long battle with Parkinson’s disease. The book details her struggle during his decline and death, and her experience of building a new life without him.

The focus of this autobiographical account was the woman’s inner emotional world — her difficulty in processing the changes, the loss, the transitions, and her sense of personal identity. Who was she if not her husband’s wife? As for many Jewish women, it was her marriage that gave her a purpose and place in the world. By the time her husband passed on she had been with him for 57 years — 57 tumultuous years — including the last 14 difficult years of his illness.

As she described so poignantly, her husband had been a wonderful man who suffered from severe anger management issues; when he felt upset or hurt (which was quite often) he would respond by ignoring his wife for weeks on end. The reader, trying to understand the description of this person as “a wonderful man,” is left bewildered. Was this a story of lost love or a tale of redemption from trauma? If those decades spent together were so tumultuous, then why didn’t the man’s death usher in a period of respite, healing, and renewal? Why was the author so immersed in pain, drowning in longing and yearning for a man who had treated her so poorly?

Checking readers’ reviews of this book, I discovered that almost everyone was asking these very same questions. “Why didn’t she just leave him long before he got sick?” they asked.