Jay and I drove to Sacramento on a clear, cool Wednesday. In a park near the capitol we met a few of my first husband’s friends, gathered at a monument to veterans to remember Terry’s life.  Chuck, who was closest to Terry, had initiated the gathering and invited me.  I hadn’t seen or communicated with Terry for over 30 years, but I felt compelled to go.  I’m glad I did.  It warmed me to see his circle of friends, to hear their stories, especially stories of how he had helped their children who had struggled with addiction. 

After Terry died the manager of the apartment he lived in had tracked me down, because the person Terry had listed as next of kin on his application didn’t respond.  It was probably his cousin Betty, who had died after he moved to that apartment several years ago.  Our daughter, Liz, was in fact his next of kin, and probably one of his very few surviving relatives.  She flew out from Pennsylvania and she and I arranged to have his apartment cleaned out.  Liz arranged for his cremation.  She, too, had not been in contact with him over all those years.  Terry had been very bitter about our divorce, which I had initiated, and when Liz spent time with him he would go on about how horrible I was and she wasn’t willing to hear it.  Over the years, I had encouraged her to make contact with him, and I was sad that she didn’t – sad that he didn’t get to know the woman she became or even know that he had two grandsons.

That’s what happened on Wednesday.  I listened to his friends talk about him with great affection, and I shared a little of his life before they knew him. 

I’ve lost people dear to me, my older sister and my parents, who knew Terry, and Joe Podolsky, my beloved second husband, who only knew him through my stories.  Grief is never easy, but with those losses it was clear and simple.  This is a different kind of grief.  The man his friends described was very much the man I knew, intelligent, funny, kind, committed to 12th Step work.   But there is the man they would have scarcely known, perhaps only glimpsed, the man I couldn’t stay married to after 20 years of trying. 

After I left Terry I learned how to be a good partner, and I’ve been blessed with two enriching and deeply satisfying marriages.  I have wondered why I couldn’t have learned those lessons in that first marriage, and if I had learned them, whether we could have stayed together, and how my life and Liz’s and Terry’s might have unfolded differently.  But despite our 12th Step work, we couldn’t heal the illness that had grown in our marriage in the first 10 years when he was still drinking and I was still enabling.  After 20 years together, in my early 40s, I felt that I was dying in that marriage, that I had to get free of the gloom of our life.  I wanted to be happy, and I didn’t believe I could ever be happy sharing a life with him.  So this grief is complicated.  I’m incredibly grateful for the life I’ve had since I left Terry, and I don’t think we could have remained friends while I was growing and flourishing.  But the life we didn’t have is a kind of hole, a life that didn’t happen in which we grew older together and shared grandchildren. 

I don’t know how to measure a life, not mine, not Terry’s.  I do know that since I left him I’ve had everything I ever imagined wanting, that I’ve been happy, that I’ve loved and been loved, that I’ve had useful and satisfying work.  At the gathering on Wednesday I could see in his friends that Terry had had some of what he wanted, that he had been of service to others, that he had made a difference in people’s lives.  Especially after seeing the sad apartment he lived in, I was really glad, relieved perhaps, to see that good side of his life.  Terry had had a gift for finding us great places to live and decorating them with taste and style, with very little contribution from me to that effort.  The apartment he died in had good light and could have been a pleasing place to live, but it was bare and chaotic, utterly unlike any of the homes he had made for us. Part of the sadness I feel now is for the life he didn’t have, a life that almost seemed to have been stolen from him at birth, a life in which he was cherished and celebrated, a life in which his rich talents produced lasting work.  But he is remembered lovingly and with gratitude by his friends, and I’m glad to know that.

I met Terry when I was 21, so 53 years of my life, all of my adult life, has been influenced by him.  The shape of our marriage led me to focus on my career in a way that I might not have if I’d had a different partner in those early years.  He introduced me to music and film I might not otherwise have known.  And I have the daughter we gave life to, and the children she bore.  I see echoes of Terry in Liz and her boys – something about the mouth, fair hair that exists nowhere else in our family, wit, love of language, a particular sense of aesthetics, a particular sense of humor.  I have 43 years of Al-anon, a program where I learned to pray, and in particular to pray for serenity, courage and wisdom; a program where I learned that the only life I could live was my own.  Having been raised to believe that religion was the opiate of the masses, Al-anon gave me access to faith and to a community grounded in faith.  I wouldn’t have the life I have or the relationships I have if I hadn’t found my way to Al-anon through Terry’s drinking.

But I can’t think of Terry without thinking of what it was like to live with the stresses of our marriage, the stress his drinking created, the stress of his relentless criticism, the stress of the lies between us, the stress of our isolation from family and close friends.  Shortly after our divorce, Liz and I were driving somewhere and she (at 11) remarked on how different I was.  How so, I asked.  Well she said, wrapping her arms around her chest and looking down, you used to be like this.  Now, she said, opening her arms and raising her smiling face, you’re like this.  It was as good a summary as I could have made.  Of course, Terry wasn’t responsible for my unhappiness or my unhealthy emotional habits.  I woke up every morning and chose my life. But we made the marriage we lived in together, we both shaped it.

I always knew that Terry’s criticism of me was a pale reflection of how intensely critical he was of himself.  Where I had grown up with unconditional love and constant messages about how terrific I was, Terry had grown up with the false belief that his mother had abandoned him and with adoptive parents who neither understood nor valued his talents.  The man who raised him thought he was a wimp, the worst insult in his world.  The drug addicted woman who raised him couldn’t give him affection or security.  He had a big mountain to climb to become a decent adult, and he did climb it.  But he carried the scars.

So my grief now is complicated.  I mourn the life we did have together and I mourn the life we didn’t have together.  I mourn with the friends who lost a friend, and I mourn with the grandchildren he didn’t know.  I mourn for the happiness he lost and the happiness he found.  We say, rest in peace.  But I don’t believe there is peace or the absence of it for the dead.  I think it is my own peace I pray for.  I wish I could tell Terry that I am at peace.  I wish I could thank him.

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This is what I read to his friends:

Terry’s life started with a tragedy and a lie.  His father was a test pilot in the air force and died in a training accident shortly after Terry was born.  His young mother, we learned much later, left Terry and his older sister in the care of their paternal uncle and his wife – the people Terry called his mom and dad – while she went to San Francisco to find work, a place to live, and child care.  Terry and his sister grew up with the lie that their mother abandoned them – dumped them.  Many years later, after the people who raised them were both dead, Terry’s sister unearthed letters their biological mom had written to the adoptive parents begging to be allowed to see her children.  It appears that the Cantrell family had turned against her, perhaps because of her German roots, and effectively stole the children from her. I believe that horrible lie had terrible consequences for Terry.

He was born in Taft, CA in 1942.  At some point, early in his childhood, the family (which included the older biological daughter of the people who raised him) moved to Sunnyvale, and that’s where he grew up, in years when it was largely farms and orchards.  Terry’s dad, Earl, worked in construction and was a heavy drinker.  His mom, Myrtle, was a nurse and became addicted to prescription drugs. The sisters left home as soon as they could, and Terry was left to deal with his addicted mother alone.  It was not a happy childhood.  By the time I met his parents, they were older and exhausted, but I could see what a fish out of water the sensitive and brainy Terry must have been in that family.  We saw them from time to time, but it was not a close or happy relationship. His only close family relationship was with his cousin Betty, who he thought of as his sister.

Terry joined the army, learned Morse code, and spent his years of service listening to enemy traffic first in the Philippines and later on a tiny island in the Bering Sea. He liked the work and was proud of his skill.  When he came back to the states he worked for United Airlines as a ticket agent and married a stewardess. I believe that marriage lasted about three years, and it had just ended in divorce when we met.

Terry and I met at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM, where I was a senior and he was a freshman.  (Terry had completed a couple of years at SF State, but St. John’s had an unusual program and required transfer students to start over as freshmen.)  We had a lot of happy times in Santa Fe, and later in Las Vegas, NM.  His drinking in those days was, in retrospect, not normal, but it hadn’t yet begun to create huge problems in his life.  We moved to San Francisco in 1971, and Terry worked briefly as a chef in a restaurant on Diamond Street.  He was a great cook, and did all the cooking throughout our marriage.

We moved to Petaluma, back to the city, and then to Sebastopol where Terry finished his BA at Sonoma State.  He liked being a student and he became an excellent writer, eventually earning a master’s in creative writing at SF State.  One of many gifts I have from our marriage is that he taught me a great deal about writing. We moved back and forth between SF and Sebastopol several times.  Our daughter was born in SF in 1978, and Terry was beside himself.  He adored her, although he was often harsh with her.  She has his wit and his gift with language.  The two of them were often hilarious together.

I worked during all of our marriage and earned enough to support the family.  I went back to work when our daughter, who we named Agee (she later changed her name), was three months old.  Terry had had brief periods of sobriety, but he was drinking heavily again, and I found that between raising an infant and working I could no longer manage living with a practicing alcoholic.  In 1979 I started going to Al-anon and Terry got sober at Duffy’s and committed to a life of sobriety.  He did counseling work at Duffy’s later, work he had a real gift for.

Through our years together Terry tried various businesses, including a printing business and an antique business.  But most of the time he worked at writing, including a stint as a film critic. 

In 1989 we were living in Washington State.  After 20 years together I realized that I couldn’t make our marriage work and I told Terry I wanted a divorce.  We did agree to move back to SF and try to keep our marriage together, but it didn’t work.  Our lives had taken different paths and I couldn’t continue living with him.  He was bitter about the divorce, and our daughter found that she couldn’t deal with Terry’s anger and, sadly, she refused to continue spending time with him.  For the first few years he tried to reach out to her several times, but his efforts always came with something of a barb that just pushed her away.  I know how much he loved her, and I’m sure that losing that relationship was a heartbreak for him.  He had made it clear that he didn’t want to hear from me, and even though I was often tempted to send him news about our daughter, I decided it would probably be more painful than welcome, so I just continued to urge her to reconnect with him, but she chose not to.

I know nothing of his life after around 1991.  I’m grateful for many things from our marriage – our wonderful daughter, my life in Al-anon, and all that I learned in our time together.  Our daughter, who renamed herself Liz, has two wonderful boys, and I can see Terry’s gift for language in both of them.  I’m deeply sorry that he didn’t get to know them and that they didn’t get to know him.  I remarried in 1996 and lost my husband to lung cancer in 2007.  I found a new partner in 2008, and we married in 2022.  I learned a great deal about how I needed to live to be a good partner from my failures in my marriage to Terry. Terry wrote to me in the first year after our divorce and told me that he wanted me to know that he forgave me.  At the time, I couldn’t see why I would need his forgiveness but as time went on, I was grateful to know I had it.  Terry was fiercely honest with himself, and was his own harshest critic. I hope he found that he was able to forgive himself.