The question always comes up, and the answer always irritates members of my family.
Their question: What do you want for Christmas?
My answer: I dunno. I haven’t thought about it.
Their response: Why are you always so difficult?
My answer this year was different. Let me explain.
Three years ago, as shared in a column at the time, my marriage came to a sudden and tragic end. As I wrote, my wife’s announcement that she was filing for divorce and moving to Utah came “like an awful telephone call in the middle of the night with a voice on the other end of the line saying that your reckless child has died in a senseless automobile accident. Shock followed by incomprehensible grief, emptiness, and despair.
“The causes for my wife’s decision trail back to our childhoods. They stuffed themselves into our psychological bags and soiled three decades of our lives together. In the end, my internal dark demons became tangible to her. She could see them standing beside me, which frightened her into action she could have taken years ago. The only way each of us will get better is for us to be apart, she reasoned. A clean break will allow us time and opportunity to heal our inner wounds, to discard our soiled baggage and maybe, years from now, remarry.â€Â
She didn’t file, but moved to Salt Lake City anyway, because her company was there. She had been working from the ranch here in Texas during her stint with 3M Health Information System and then with Ingenix, a division of United Healthcare, both of which had offices in SLC. Telecommuting, which once sounded like a good idea, was taking its tolls on her health and on our relationship.
About a year after she moved out there, she found a specialist who diagnosed her as having temporal lobe epilepsy, or TLE. And, she may have had it since childhood. Lots of folks have it, but don’t know they have it. Two examples are Lewis Carroll and Joan of Arc. Want to know what it’s like to have TLE? Think of Carroll’s Alice and her journeys in Wonderland. We now know Carroll was describing things he saw, not the things he imagined. And Joan got burned at the stake, which surely must be some kind of metaphor for our pre-diagnosis relationship.
Among many things, TLE distorts reality, causes extreme head and body pains, and is just a nasty thing to have, especially if you and the people you live with don’t know you have it. Now we know, and now we try to control it through various means that include medication, therapy, and rest.
The corporate environment is not good for anyone with TLE, and life with her last employer finally got to the point that she consulted an attorney to see what legal remedies were possible to keep management from violating the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and triggering her TLE.
Finally, after much discussion, she agreed it was time to quit her job, sell her condo, pack up her cats, and move back to Texas. A major part of the discussion centered on the fact that we both knew we couldn’t live much longer without each other, and that this seemed like the time to be together again.
Can we blame TLE, 3M, and Ingenix on our marital problems? Not entirely, but a condition such as hers is diabolical and destructive to relationships unless those involved understand the importance of communication, patience, and physical limitations. Some days are not as good as others, but knowing the reasons keeps both of us from misreading the signs and acting inappropriately, again.
As I told her three years ago, at the start of our unhappy separation, our chances for success are much greater if we stay together. We survived events beyond the abilities of most individuals because we met those challenges together. Two hands connected by intertwining fingers. Or, two people connected by Velcro hearts, as I used to describe it.
And so, my answer this year to the question of what I want for Christmas is simply this: My Sharon is home, and that’s all that I need.
To each of you, we send our best wishes for a wonderful Christmas and an even better new year.
John David Powell is an award-winning writer, university lecturer, and contributor to the Christian History Project. His email address is johndavidpowell@yahoo.com.
