I couldn’t agree more with Joanna Moorhead’s description (28 February 2015) of how a married couple can find themselves estranged: "life chips away at them … because life is like that and people change and times change, and sometimes marriages – even ones begun in the best of circumstances, and for exactly the right reasons – can’t go on." The Hawkings she cites as finding a "good way" to end their marriage, based on mutual respect.
In my experience, this is rarely what happens. One person leaves the other, often without warning. There may be a midlife crisis, an exciting new partner to make them feel young again, and their way of dealing with guilt is to lay waste to the past: "I’ve been unhappy for years"; "We may have looked happy, but she made me feel emasculated"; "He never respected how I spent our money"; "We were always arguing." These excuses do nothing to honour the love that brought them to marry in the first place, and the financial, emotional and physical investment they both made into their family, especially if there are children.
Watching people dying is the hardest thing. It may be clear to an outsider that life has given up on them, but those at death's door often don’t realise it. Gradually the heart beats more slowly, the breathing becomes laboured, the organs function badly. With poor appetites, the mortally sick can stay alive on the most meagre rations. It sometimes seems they are afraid to turn their backs on the world they know, even though they might be bedridden, paralysed, helpless, for fear of turning to face the unknown unseen future. In the same way, some of us stay in marriages and dead relationships, even though we have been abandoned, given up on; we are afraid to separate because we want our marriage to continue to live, we are afraid of what a new life might incur without marriage: church disapproval, family pain and suffering, loneliness and alienation.
Supporting the dying on their journey is a given. Who would doubt God’s compassion and love for those in distress who are letting go of the most precious gift we have, life with all its highs and despite its lows. After their death, their families and friends, their church celebrate their lives in a funeral mass with eulogies. But isn’t divorce a bereavement too? Surely the God of love also cares for both individuals in wounded and dying relationships where life together has become intolerable, for the abandoned and the abandoner?
It may be time for the end of a marriage to be treated by the Church with as much tender interest and concern as the death of a person. Might it be possible for the Church to facilitate a loving and forgiving separation for those in distress? In the same way as we have say six sessions of marriage preparation, could we introduce six sessions of peace and reconciliation to a separating couple? A funeral-style Mass to mark the end of a fruitful loving relationship could be very healing, especially if the partners and the children were able to attend. We celebrate long marriages in grand Masses at Westminster cathedral. What about dead marriages, a Requiem for the loving relationships of the divorced and separated? In that way, we would obey Joanna Moorhead’s exhortation "Judge less. Support more. Celebrate what was, even if it is over."
Evleen Mann, Twickenham, Middx
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