There’s a simple but urgent reminder for all of us in Belle Burden’s addictive divorce memoir, whether or not we are or ever were married, and whether happily or unhappily so (if we even know).
Read why Strangers is so addictive from last week’s CRUSH Letter: Why Everyone You Know Is Reading Belle Burden’s Divorce Memoir. Scroll down to find it below.
There are many lessons we can take away from Belle Burden’s addictive, sold-out divorce memoir. The most glaring is to heed your lawyer’s advice when your betrothed presents you with an unprecedented one-sided rider to your family’s standard prenuptial agreement. (Don’t feel badly if your family doesn’t have a “form prenup” on file, neither does the Stanley dynasty.)
But the most useful lesson is not for those who are contemplating marriage, already married or a party to the divorce (or indeed, the victim of any other heartbreaking calamity). It is for those of us standing outside tragedy, not in the intimate circle of family of friends. A little removed, yet still witness to the poor, shell-shocked souls going through it.
Useful because we so often find ourselves face-to-face with friends and acquaintances going through divorce (death, illness, litigation, a public business meltdown), and we mostly don’t know what to say.
The lesson is on what to say when we run in to them.
You can find it more than two-thirds of the way through Burden’s unsettling memoir. At this point, her husband has left her a couple months earlier— without warning or explanation — and she is still in a state of despair and disbelief, but nonetheless has to keep the trains running, get up out of bed and go out in the world. She is living with her two teenage daughters in a small, close-knit community on Martha’s Vineyard where everybody knows everybody’s business and her and her husband’s divorce is a topic at every dinner party (from which, because she is newly single, she is painfully excluded).
In this small world where everybody knows, reactions to Burden have run the gamut. She has been ignored, even shunned, by those she considered close friends. Other beloved friends greet her without acknowledging that her loss even though she is raw, inflicting their own form of pain by failing to acknowledge her obvious grief. One man whom she considered a good friend stopped when he saw her, turned around and rushed away in the opposite direction. One particularly insensitive woman exclaimed to Burden over a glass of wine “God, when you don’t have a husband here, no one invites you to anything!” (This woman’s husband was arriving momentarily and she was presumably just hanging out with other women to plug the hole in his absence.)
On the other hand, she is surprised by the gestures of support and care by those she doesn’t know well. Some offer to accompany her on walks, another welcomes her for tea on the regular. One couple drops off her favorite ham and cheese croissant on Saturdays.
All deeply appreciated by and comforting to Burden, but one day when Burden is on her daily walk she has an encounter with an acquaintance who demonstrates such grace that I got up from the couch I was lounging on, grabbed a pen and circled it. “Rember this!” I wrote in the margin.
She had spotted the acquaintance on the other side of the road. She is walking one way, he is biking the other. She writes that she didn’t know him well, that he was married with kids, famous in the world of professional sports. When he saw her he stopped, got off his bike, crossed the street and said “I want you to know how sorry I am that this happened to you.” Then he asked how she was doing, how the kids were doing.
Genuine, gracious, simple, brilliant.
Genuine and gracious, because he was intentional. He could have easily kept riding in the other direction. Instead, even though he is not a close friend, he stopped, got off his bike, crossed the road.
Simple because the phrase is short and meaningful and not overly dramatic. It doesn’t escalate; it wouldn’t inadvertently tear a scab off a recently healed wound. “I am sorry this happened to you,” is what he’s saying. Nothing more is needed. Often times, if you are in pain, nothing more is wanted. But the giver, having offered that much, can pause, take stock of the reaction, and perhaps (as he did) ask a follow-up question.
Brilliant because, in addition to the above, it is widely applicable. It is useful to have a phrase that can be deployed across a variety of circumstances that might be wrought, sensitive and discreet, the sort that are most likely to find us hesitating, hemming and hawing over the precise nature of the calamity and the exact right thing to say. Also brilliant because these are the types of circumstances where we are not privy to the details, and with this script we can’t misstep. And if, for instance, the circumstance is a divorce where we know both parties but none of the gory bits of who did what to whom, it could be said genuinely to both parties.
Also brilliant because it is a phrase that is so straightforward and simple that you have a shot at managing to get it out without triggering your own feelings of loss. I remember seeing a man who’d been recently widowed ahead of me in line at Whole Foods less than a year after losing my own husband. I wanted to say something to acknowledge his grief, but everything running through my mind was too expansive, and would have caused my own melt down — not helpful to him (or me). But it troubled me that I said nothing. This gracious script I might have been able to get out.
A simple acknowledgment of another person’s raw pain that is gracious, without much fanfare, strikes the perfect the tone. The acknowledgement is a small kindness that brings great comfort. At least it did for Burden burden, as it did for me when I was widowed. Not to acknowledge it when another’s pain is in the rawest stage is not “doing nothing.” It causes pain.
”I want you to know how sorry I am that this happened to you.”
I am sorry this happened to you, Belle.
But thank you to the gentleman on the bike on the other side of the road. You’ve offered up a lesson in graciousness and kindness to blunt this sometimes unfathomable, cruel world. Carry on, I hope your ride is beautiful.
If you liked that, you may enjoy these stories.
Dish Stanley
Dish Stanley
Dish Stanley
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