Dear Friends,
Last week I shared the introduction to my new book, One Slice at a Time. It’s about one of the most humbling years of my life and what I learned from it. The book has 28 chapters, and I’m sending the first five, one a week, to give you a feel for the whole.
Here’s Chapter 1…
Chapter 1: Divorce Is Like a Death
“Record my misery; list my tears on Your scroll — are they not in Your record?” (Psalm 56:8).
There’s a bench in Lexington, Illinois, with Lana’s name on it. I put it there after she died. When I’m driving that way I stop, and I sit on it, and no one minds.
That’s what a death gets you. A bench. A service with people standing in the back. Casseroles in the freezer for a month. Cards that keep arriving after you’ve stopped expecting them. Fourteen years later, her name still comes up in conversation and people say it out loud without lowering their voices.
Eleven years after Lana died, I got married again, and less than a year later it was over, and I got none of that.
No service. No casseroles. No cards. A few people who didn’t know it had happened and asked how married life was treating me. A few more who knew and were quiet, the way people are when they’re not sure whether to say sorry or congratulations.
And five hundred people who had been invited to a celebration that never took place.
I felt maybe the loss didn’t count.
I had a whole case built. It was short. We never lived together — not more than a week or two at a time as we were traveling between states until we got things together. There were no children between us. Nothing to divide, nobody’s schooling to rearrange, no house to sell.
I’d sit there and think: people go through “real” divorces. Twenty years, four kids, a mortgage. What do I have to grieve?
And underneath that, quieter: with Lana, death came by cancer. With this one, I wondered if I did it to myself.
I still don’t know everything that went wrong. But somewhere in there, I was part of it.
So I went eight or nine months treating a wound as an embarrassment, wondering at times why I felt so tired.
What She Said
I told Sharon some of this, sideways, the way you tell somebody a thing you’ve decided isn’t important.
She didn’t argue with the facts. She just put it in a different category.
“A divorce is like a death,” she said. “You’ve already been through such a great loss in your life. You still have the same trigger spots, and they’re going to feel different than the ones you had with Lana.”
Then: “But there is a grief to the death of something.”
And then, the other part that I wrote down: “Don’t put yourself down when you just need to break down. Go ahead.”
The phrase she used was trigger spots. Same trigger spots as a death, she said, but they’d feel different than the ones I’d had with Lana.
She was right, and the difference is specific. Lana’s trigger spots were mostly objects and dates — her handwriting on something, the anniversary, a song. They ambush you and then they pass.
The ones from a divorce are questions. Somebody says how’s married life and the trigger isn’t grief, it’s arithmetic — how much do I tell this person, how long will this take, are they going to want the whole thing right here in the parking lot?
Same Category
Sharon and Chuck used to own a real estate franchise, and the company flew them out to California for the franchise training. Chuck wanted Sharon to be in the room for all of it.
One of the first things the trainers covered was hiring. If somebody comes to interview who has just been through a death or a divorce, they said, understand that within that first year they’re not going to be ready to carry a full load. Bring them on part-time. Watch how they handle pressure before you hand them everything.
The trainers put those two in the same category. A death and a divorce.
The first six months, they said, the person is going through the process. The second six months, they start making their decisions — they may pick up and move, they may change everything, you don’t know yet.
They weren’t saying don’t hire them. They were saying don’t expect peak performance inside the first year.
A national real estate company, teaching franchise owners how to staff an office, had a spot-on theology of grief.
I told Sharon I was definitely not at peak performance.
What That Number Did
That fact itself was truly encouraging — and it’s just a fact. A year. Not a suggestion, not a goal, not a spiritual benchmark. A period of reduced capacity that hiring managers plan around.
What it did was change the question.
I had been asking what is wrong with me — why couldn’t I concentrate, why would I lose an afternoon, why a task I’d done a thousand times now took two days. That question has no floor. You can fall down it forever.
This is the timeline changes the question, and it has an answer.
I’m not at peak performance. I’m four months in. Those two sentences sit together without contradiction.
A Floor, Not a Ceiling
Years ago I lost a job after eighteen months. It took me seven years to get over it.
Eighteen months of employment. Seven years of recovery.
I remember running that arithmetic on that one at the time and finding the answer unsurvivable. If a year and a half of work cost me seven years, what does a thirty-year marriage cost? Most people wouldn’t live long enough to finish paying.
Grief isn’t priced by duration. That’s the mercy in it and it’s also the warning, because it cuts the other way too — short doesn’t mean small.
So take the year as a floor and not a ceiling.
I’m still working through it.
The year isn’t a due date. It’s the earliest anyone should be expecting much of you, not the day the books balance.
What a Death Gets That This Doesn’t
Grief isn’t the hard part. Grief is just heavy.
The hard part is grief with no permission structure around it.
When Lana died there was a script and everybody knew their lines. People knew to come. They knew to bring food, and to say her name, and that I’d be strange for a while, and that nothing I did at a funeral would be held against me.
The script feels different for this. There’s no gathering. There’s no casserole. There’s no socially recognized moment where someone is allowed to be visibly wrecked in front of people who love them.
Sometimes what you get instead is opinions. And a certain kind of question — how are you doing? — that you can’t help wondering about. Is this care, or is this fishing?
I can’t say I got this from many people. But the question sat there anyway, and I found I was trying to answer it before I answered.
I went looking for the script. I asked Sharon at the beginning whether I ought to be going to a divorce recovery group, or if there was a book, or if someone had written down the basic guidelines — don’t contact her family for two years, or whatever the rule was supposed to be.
Then I admitted the real problem, which was that I didn’t even know what questions to ask.
That’s what an absent ritual feels like from the inside. Not sadness. Disorientation. A man of sixty-one at the time with thirty years of ministry behind him, driving down the highway wondering whether if a pamphlet.
So the grief goes underground, where it does not get smaller. It just stops being witnessed.
Everything else in this book assumes you’ll let yourself call this what it is. A death. A loss of something you highly valued.
The Porcupine
I sent my six kids a cartoon after things fell apart. A porcupine sitting in a bathtub of water, with no bubbles left in it. The porcupine was looking at the bottle of bubble bath on the floor beside the tub, saying, “Well, that didn’t work out very well.”
I told them this was how I felt right then.
Sharon’s counsel about the kids was practical. Tell them when it’s a rough day. Tell them when it’s a good one. If they don’t know, they’ll compare notes with each other — I talked to Dad today, he said he was fine, but he didn’t sound fine — and they’ll spend their energy trying to work out whether you’re all right instead of just knowing.
A grown child does not need to be protected from the fact that you’re sad. They need to be protected from having to guess.
The Song of the Bow
When Saul died, David tore his clothes and wept and fasted until evening.
Saul had spent years hunting him. Saul had thrown a spear at him in his own house, chased him into the wilderness with three thousand men, and hunted him from cave to cave. There was no funeral David was obligated to attend and no ritual anybody would have expected of him.
Nobody would have blamed him for feeling relief. He probably did feel relief. Relief and grief are not opposites, and they apparently have no trouble sharing a room.
What David did was write it down. He composed a lament — the Song of the Bow — and 2 Samuel says he ordered that the people of Judah be taught it.
He took a loss nobody had a ceremony for, and he made one.
That’s the move. When there’s no bench and no service and no casserole, you don’t get to wait for somebody to hand you a ritual. You build the ritual.
What You Might Do
Give yourself the year. Write down the date it ended and count forward twelve months, and if you’re not at peak performance in month five, look at the number instead of examining your character.
Tell the people closest to you where you actually are. Not the full account — a rough day is enough, and it saves them from guessing.
And make the ritual, since nobody’s going to make one for you. Write the thing down. I typed out my own summary of that whole relationship — the good in it, the bad in it, all of it — not to publish and not to send to anybody. Writing it down let me look at it as an object instead of a wound, and then let me set it on a shelf for a bit.
You are not exempt from grief because your marriage was short, or because there were no children, or because a court finished it faster than a funeral would have.
There’s a bench in Lexington with Lana’s name on it, and I stop when I’m driving that way.
Nothing anywhere marks the other one.
So I’m making this.
Will you pray with me?
Father, thank You that You keep a record of tears that nobody else witnessed. Thank You that You don’t require a loss to be respectable before You would call it a loss. Lord, for those of us who have been ruling ourselves out — because it was short, or because we’re the ones who filed, or because we think we’ve already used up our allotment of grief — would You overrule that? Let us stop auditing our own pain to see whether it qualifies. Give us the honesty to tell the people who love us where we really are today. And where there’s no ceremony and no casserole and nobody knows what to say to us, would You be the One who marks it. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Questions for Reflection
1. Read 2 Samuel 1:17-27. David composed a lament for a man who had hunted him and had it taught to the whole nation. What does it tell you that he made a ceremony where none was required?
2. Read Psalm 56:8. What does it mean that God keeps a record of tears (King James Version) — and what would change if you believed that about the crying you’ve done where nobody could see you?
3. What’s the case you’ve built for why your loss doesn’t count? Write the argument out in full, then read it back and ask whether you’d say it to a friend in the same position.
4. What date does your year start from? Count twelve months forward and write that date down. What would you do differently this month if you took that timeline seriously?
Next week: Chapter 2, “It’s Never Just One Thing,” which starts with a phone call to a hospital billing office over four hundred dollars.
If you’d rather keep reading now, the whole book is free to read or listen to online, and the paperback, Kindle, Audible and Google Play editions are linked on the same page:
theranch.org/one-slice-at-a-time
As I said last week, many of you have been journeying with me for years, and you’ve steadied me more often than you know. Thank you for walking with me through this one, too.
Love,
Eric Elder writes for page, stage & screen to glorify God’s name so Christ may be seen! Hit reply to send Eric a note! Use this link to subscribe or unsubscribe.