I’m just going to come right out and say it: my husband’s ex-wife died on Saturday of meanness exacerbated by crazy cancer.
It should have a certain amount of…what?…What emotion am I searching for? Sadness? Closure? Relief? attached to it if it weren’t for the fact that she was in prison…for murder. First-degree murder.
Good. I have your attention.
Late last year we heard through the grapevine (because a story like this is just too juicy and implausible to stay geographically contained), that his ex of nearly twenty years had shot a young man dead in her kitchen. The exact details are still pretty sketchy, and due to the fact that he was clearly a victim of bad choices, one of them being wrong place/wrong time, and the other—finding himself on the shot-gun end of her bad side—I will leave this stranger-than-fiction story of cold-blooded murder at that.
Oh, except to say that she held the sheriff’s and SWAT at bay for nine hours by shooting at them while barricaded inside of the house with the dead body.
That explains the five counts of attempted murder.
After her decision to surrender was helped along by a canister of tear-gas, she was hauled off to jail where they found out she was extremely ill (in every way imaginable. Their words, not mine), so arraignment was delayed because it looked like she wouldn’t live long enough to stand trial.
She went into remission long enough to cause trouble in prison. Seriously? Cause trouble in prison?
If I have a head cold I’m too uncomfortable to stand up for myself at the DMV, yet she’s rowdy enough to have all of her priveledges revoked. What?
Here’s why I’m telling you all of this.
When I met my husband for the first time on a blind date he said his ex-wife was crazy.
I rolled my eyes.
He said she tried to kill him.
I sighed and looked at my watch.
He explained how he had left their ranch one night with basically the clothes on his back.
Yawwwwwwwn.
If you date long enough this kind of ex-bashing plays like a broken record. I’d say ninety percent of the men I dated, by their account, had certifiable ex-wives.
I can be fairly certain that’s one of the nicest things my ex says about me!
I pegged him as a wolf-cryer, that is until a few friends corroborated his stories—and I saw Gone Girl.
So, on Monday when we heard that she had died, my husband contacted her brother. The sane one.
The one who knew that husband had been forced to cut and run and never looked back—and he totally understood why (actually she told everyone Raphael was dead. Are you creeped out yet?)
“You’re welcome to come by the ranch on Friday to see if there’s anything you want”, her brother, now the executor, offered graciously.
He was seriously considering it. Looking at his calendar to see how easy it would be to clear his schedule.
“I’m coming with you!”, I volunteered. I was curious. I wanted to see where this woman lived and the big log house my husband had built with his own two hands—and then been pushed far enough to just walk away from.
Almost the moment I said it I wanted to suck the words back in like they do in the cartoons. I got an enormous sinking feeling in my gut and not the good kind that gives you a flat stomach—the sickening kind.
What was my motivation?
To be supportive? To be helpful? To end my week with a road trip?
Sure. All of those things. But when I dug deeper I had to admit—my main motivation was morbid curiosity.
It has been my experience, learned in hindsight, that nothing good can come when the motivation is MORBID curiosity.
How does this add to my life?
How does this drive my life forward?
Those are the questions we ask ourselves now. Finally!
We are both trying to have less and less of those Shit, I shouldn’t have done that, gone there, said that, moments.
In order to do that, we have to ask ourselves those two questions over and over again, sometimes twenty times a day. (Well, I do, I’m a slow learner).
How does this add to my life?
How does this drive my life forward?
Morbid curiosity can’t stand up to cross-examination.
What was I thinking? What were WE thinking?
That ranch is not a feel-good place. In fact, it’s worse than just the bad juju his ex spread all over the place, and her lousy choice in drapes—it’s the scene of a murder.
The other feeling, the ‘I want my stuff! The stuff I left behind but I haven’t thought about it in twenty years’ feeling—that’s not great motivation either.
You have to ask yourself why you suddenly care so goddamn much.
One percent sentimentality.
One percent nostalgia.
One percent schadenfruede.
Ninety-seven percent morbid curiosity.
We not going to the ranch. Neither of us.
We both decided that a trip up there would add absolutely ZERO to our quality of life, not to mention the fact that there’s not enough sage in the world to cleanse the bad juju off anything we might bring back.
We both felt lighter. Better. Closure.
Damn this conscious living thing takes a lot of consciousness! Who knew!
Carry on,
xox
