This is Part 3 of a series.

A good friend, after a long speaking engagement, was greeted by his wife at the door with, “I’m leaving. I’ve found someone else.”

Yes, it was almost like that – exactly.

No explanation, other than I found someone else.

Shocked and devastated, he began to eloquently write about this experience.

As it was cathartic for him to write, I hope it is comforting for you to read, knowing that the intensity of your feelings and thoughts have a friend.

Part 3….

The hollowness. Empty. Void. Darkness. Ain’t no sunshine. The light is out. My soul bare. Eyes burned in the sockets. Wave after wave of suffocation.In an instant, who I was forever scarred.My life gone. My body lives on.

Living, dreaming, planning, building one moment. And the next, it’s gone. Oh, yeah, it sometimes was on automatic pilot. Sometimes even boring. But everything changes in an instant. Everything taken away. Except for this shell. This shell of existence goes on.

The pain is constant. Only sleep quiets the incessant ache. But sleep is cursed with waking. And at present there is no cure for consciousness. The relief of death denied by the insistent, incessant call of life.

Longing for yesterday. Give me back my tomorrows. Just take away my present pain.
Sudden as a heart attack.But no warning. There were no signs. No chance to adjust, to diagnose, to remediate, to prescribe or transition. Just gone in plain sight.

There’s an old Zen parable about a meditation master instructing his students on meditation through concentration on inhaling and exhaling. One complained of the boredom of breathing. At this, the master grabbed the student’s neck and held his head under water for nearly a minute. The master then asked the student who was gasping for air, “do you still think breathing is boring???

My boring love affair is over. When did we forget to breathe? Where did it go? Why can’t it go on? My partner. My best friend. The team. My wife. The mother of my children.The inseparable constant.Thirty-two, thirty-three years. Gone without a warning. Without a trace. No body. Nothing that makes sense.

Her tears were to wet my cold dead face at my final hour. Her hands were to comfort and cover the hands of my two others that complete me. Her timeless beauty still shining at my last.So many years from now. Or at worst, it would be my agonized cries and sobs piercing the night as my tears fall on those high cheek bones at the coldest hour. But there is no body.

“I’ve met somebody. I’m leaving you.?? That was it. Two short sentences that broke my world asunder. That tore my heart from my chest. That leave me cold, dead and bleeding. I can’t talk to my best friend, my soul mate, my confidant about this when the words came from her cold lips.

How do you make sense of the unsensible? No, boys and girls it isn’t rational. It doesn’t make sense. We were a great team. We were the perfect couple. We were lots of things.
And now we’re not. We have left. One is gone. For the first time in thirty-three years, when one is gone, we are no longer one and we’re no longer two. My world has stopped. But it must go on.

I’m so damn lost. I’m so confused. I’m spinning untethered in the cold dark void. I’ve been transported to a place that’s uncharted and I need to find my way home. But I’m no longer certain of home. Or me. Or much of anything. I’ve gone from all together to all apart. My competencies in question.

If self-awareness begins with knowing what is happening inside, I feel my very survival is at stake. But I must force myself to focus, reflect and make my inner state an object of my awareness. I know that a part of me is afraid. Afraid of loss. Afraid of losing the thing I value most ?” my family, our team of four.

These raw, bleeding emotions, gushing, exploding, oozing, seeping and demanding. It requires great effort to assess my being and look at how I can be true to who I am in perspective, and look at these emotions and not view this vast wasteland through them.
I can have these emotions, but they cannot have me.

“I’ve met somebody. I’m leaving you.?? It echoes. It haunts. It taunts. When will this nightmare end?