When I was 21 years old, my younger brother fell ill with a rare and aggressive disease. He was dead in two weeks.
He was a young and strong and kind and calm and funny, and when he died it was sudden and unexpected. But it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. The only place I could turn with my anger was heaven itself. God, patient and gentle and kind as He is, accepted all of my screams. I never felt ashamed of my grief and anger and no one begrudged me for it.
Now I look back at the memories I have of him with such joy and look forward to the eternity I get to spend with him again someday. When I think of Robby, I feel a rush of warmth, even though it’s mixed with pain. I know exactly who he was and know that I can trust his love for me.
I still feel grief, but it’s just part of me now. I’m not angry like I once was. To overcome the bitterness was not easy, but it happened in its time. All I had to do was stay close to the Lord and let time pass. People and spaces allowed me all the time I needed to heal, and I did.
The grief caused by infidelity was so different.
Where death simply robbed me of something precious, betrayal made me question if something I thought was precious ever really was.
An affair that fully wrecks a marriage and family doesn’t just redirect the future, it completely reframes the past. It leaves you analyzing each memory and asking a list of questions:
- Was any of it real?
- Was I being deceived then too?
- Who was I married to?
- Which memories can I trust?
- Was I loved, or was I merely useful?
- Was everyone else aware while I was the last to know?
- How much went on that I never knew about and never will?
Not a single memory is left untarnished. I’m unable to look on any of them securely because the man I thought I knew doesn’t exist anymore and some days I wonder if he ever really did.
Aside from the past being poisoned and my presumed happy future being robbed, the new future was now riddled with new and ongoing harms.
When my brother passed, the death was a single and isolated incident. The past was preserved and the future erased. There was one harm and my only job going forward was to learn how to carry it.
With an infidelity divorce, there was the initial discovery, the poisoning of the past, and a future full of potential harms yet to come. It wasn’t just a matter of learning how to carry a new reality, but more of learning how to navigate an entirely new and hostile existence.
The best analogy I can give is that losing my brother was like having my legs broken and then being wheeled to a hospital where I could be treated, released to physical therapy, and allowed to rest and recover for as long as I needed. People looked at the casts and understood I was injured. No one questioned that I needed time, and I learned how to walk again. Maybe it felt different than before, and there was no forgetting what it took to get to a “healed” point, but there was no additional harm being compounded on top of the initial break. There’s pain in healing, but it’s reparative.
The healing process after being left for an affair partner felt more like being shot in the back and then dropped into an active war zone with some instructions to remove the arrow myself before it became infected or the kids saw, all while making sure they had dinner and the mortgage got paid. And just when I would start to patch one wound, another arrow lands: A text message. A court filing. A new expense. A fresh realization about the past. A kids’ event. A holiday alone.
And because life apparently has a sense of humor, every so often the people with quivers full of arrows would pop up to tell me I was childish for still bleeding so much, and then they would take my kids for the week.
It’s not the same kind of healing process lol.
I’m not saying healing from death was easier, but I am saying the healing process was significantly kinder and more linear.
With my brother, I was given permission to grieve and space to talk about it. With betrayal, I was expected to heal while the arrows were still flying. I was expected to cover the hurt. I was expected not to bleed, at least not in public. This was an expectation that came almost immediately from the people responsible from my pain, and in time spread out to the wider circles. After all, life must go on, and it must go on with you making sure to keep the people in your periphery as comfortable as possible, and what I’ve learned over time is that there is nothing that makes people more uncomfortable than divorce, especially the kind where there was infidelity and active harm.
And yet, while I had to find a kind of silence in my daily life, patient and gentle and kind as God is, just as He accepted my screams after losing my brother, He accepted my screams from the battlefield of betrayal too. In the privacy of my home, I have cried out as much and as often as necessary. Every moment of every day, He has been willing to meet me there, because He alone is always the same.
I’m not thankful for the harm or the pain, but I am thankful that God never asked me to pretend they weren’t real. He never rushed me. He never told me to stop bleeding while the arrows were still flying. He simply stayed and stayed true.
And perhaps that’s why, despite everything, I still trust Him.
