What we lost

Have been pondering on what was lost when the ADD marriage dissolved. 

Since I've been ill for quite some time now (it's not serious), I've been alone and incapable of most things I usually do. It hits me then, how an entire world is lost with divorce. The narrative. The stories we used to tell. The memories I'm not certain about anymore, since their meaning may have shifted.

I believe narrative is so important. When trying to communicate to the children what's important in life, I reach for the narratives I've lived with, only to find they've dissolved. What is loyalty. What is fairness. What is great and transcendent. What is the quality of a person we're drawn to. 

My children still trust their father and are devoted to him. I don't trust him anymore. But does that mean all the conclusions I've drawn previously can retroactively be dismissed? Was I blind to love him? Or am I blind now, because I've made a final decision?

Is the truth about love and our relationships ever flowing, so that when we leave a person we lose all knowledge about what has happened and would have happened, had we stayed? Does our will to survive make us categorize and paint signal colors on what was really a million soft shades, changing with the light? Do I make things up? 

I feel the loss of our union is a tragedy. We shared many thoughts. These are now unattached. Since I have no one to confirm any of it, I find myself disbelieving what used to be well known facts (things are done in certain ways, this is hazardous, this is bad for the environment, this has been disproved, this can be trusted). This, and the jokes and stories, and the family traditions, have all fallen into an abyss of distrust.

I will need to make myself a new set of beliefs. I don't want them hastily made, though. Sometimes I feel I'm surrounded by people who are certain of almost everything, while I feel the more I learn the less I know. One might need a companion, if nothing else, to make this bearable. I lost the companion. 

If it were up to me, none of this would have happened.