Alone on Christmas

My father, age 85.

My dad has been married twice. His first marriage to my mother lasted 32 years. His second marriage is barely limping along at the 22 year mark. Last spring, my oldest brother and I took my dad to lunch. During our time together, my father was quick to abandon his usual topics and began listing some unusual "new" behaviors that characterized his wife.


For our benefit, he enlisted a bold palette to color a vision of a woman who washed her towels and bed sheets every day, threw clothes away as fast as she could buy them and loitered by the clothes dryer late at night to drown the sounds of clandestine phone calls. He shared with us that his wife had recently refused to wash his clothes, shop for his groceries, prepare his dinner or clean the bathroom where he bathed. She had also become a fan of sending and receiving text messages, at all hours of the day.  The two had become room mates and one of them, apparently, had a secret. While my brother and I heard oral confirmation that his wife was indeed a crazy bat, a notion I had held since I met her, my father suspected infidelity.


My brother offered three words to our father: cell phone detail. The devil is in the details after all. Four days later, detail in hand, my dad telephoned me. He had highlighted a suspicious phone number, tallied the minutes, and noted the times of day. With minimal sleuthing, my dad had also identified the owner of the phone number. The next step was confrontation. Not prone to controversy of any kind, my father decided to leave the cell phone detail on the kitchen counter.


Since then, volatility has been the only accurate measure of their marriage and his wife has "left him" and returned on a number of occasions. Her abandonment pattern is unpredictable and ranges from just a few days to being gone for more than a month's time. This story is still unfolding.


What have I learned? I have learned that love dies slowly and deliberately.  I realize that loyalty enjoys a mystical place of honor that cannot always be rationalized or explained using words.  I know now that people cannot be talked out of love. There are more lessons here, but I'm not sure I'm ready to express them.


My dad spent this past Christmas alone. His wife was in abandonment mode, and despite my earnest invitation to include him in our holiday, he opted to go it alone.