Ambiguous loss and complicated grief in a dying marriage

Far too many marriages die.  A casual count brings it to 50 percent of them.  What starts out for many as noble dreams of love and happiness and of a vision of achieving a life’s purpose often ends in the silent catastrophe of discontent and division.

Think about the holy purpose of marriage in these terms:

“Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to humankind is to bring up a family.”
— George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)

The purpose of safe and loving family is integral to ordered and good society.

In all terms of gross domestic product (GDP), the foundation of which is family.  It is the absolute backbone of life.  And yet, the dissolution of the family unit through failings of one or both in a marriage — or what would be marriage — bring uncertainty and insecurity into vulnerable lives that need that certainty and security for the development of their very personhood.

I’ve always maintained, through my own experience of marital brokenness, that children can prosper with even one “good” parent who is devoted to their service; to love them in the truth, to allow them to learn and to facilitate and not rescue them from important life lessons, to keep them safe at all costs.

But oftentimes there is the need of a good parent to assist the children recover from trauma exacted upon them by their marriage partner, a fellow parent or stepparent, or other adult caregivers who abused them.  

Tragically there are also so many children for whom no safe and responsible parent or parent-figure exists, but for so many it might be a grandparent that fulfils that role.

For the parent doing their best, their best is good enough, and their service is a godly task, a task they would choose every day of the week.  Their sole purpose is to bring up those lives who will live for the next generations.  It is a holy handing off of a baton, a process taking 20 years minimum.  They who receive no help from a former partner have borne witness to the anguish of their heart, the trauma of the abuse of neglect, where the former partner preferred their own selfish gain than to join the godly task of keeping young lives safe.

When I think of such a parent who did their best, their best being good enough, their service a godly task that they gave their life to, I think of my maternal grandmother.  Her husband was an alcoholic gambler who drank and gambled his pay away.  My grandmother had a tough life until my grandfather passed away, and she had twenty more years, where she got to witness her children prosper as parents themselves.  Alcoholism and gambling, as two examples of threats to the family, to a very large extent, died with Grandad.  And everyone who was raised in relative safety prospered.  Yet it was people like me, who for a time picked up the bottle again, who put family in the threatening arms of the enemy once more.  Until AA and God put me right.

Now to finish on the theme of the title: Ambiguous loss and complicated grief in a marriage that dies.

The call of duty to one’s family is a diligent one, often for oneself to go without in order to provide, yet also to watch a partner decline from their duty, to disembark from the sacred task, for the temptation and glory of self.

It is an ambiguous loss because the partner doing their duty watches on as the other remains present yet is lost to their task and have disappeared even though they remain.  This loss is an indescribable agony because the function, the care, the love, the devotion, has become something quite opposite, and pain, confusion, and chaos expunge everything good.

It is a complicated grief because there is a striving to get through, to convince and to convict, to raise alarm, for any good conscience would be roused to godly sorrow and repentance.  But the cries go unheeded, and for many those cries are barred and disallowed, and worst when those cries are viciously silenced.

In ambiguous loss and in complicated grief a marriage slowly dies, though in hindsight was dead long before it was recognised.

~

The service of family is the holiest service of all humanity because it invests in what must be nurtured for a generation or more.  There is no more practical way of serving God than to prefer to serve vulnerable family over being served.  To do such service is its own blessing.

If yours is such a service, though it tires you weary, though you faint in the struggle, though despair threatens to sweep you away, you are a saviour in the shape of The Saviour.