"The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones." - Act 3, scene ii, Julius Ceasar by William Shakespeare
A couple years ago, two dear friends of ours divorced after thirty-five years of marriage and four sons. The all-too-predictable bitterness and recrimination attended the parting. The once vibrant flesh of their marriage rotted like driftwood ignored on some remote island.
Much of their anger remains. The lens of memory through which years of intimacy and tender moments were seen is now clouded with hostility.
One year ago, another friend of mine lost a hospital job he had held for twenty years. The place he had come each workday for two decades, where he had been welcomed as a colleague, where he had developed meaningful friendships, was suddenly a territory where he was no longer welcome.
Shakespeare's lines apply to relationships and careers as surely as they do to the lives of disgraced heroes. Former Senator John Edwards, for example, did some good things in his career and their must have been happy moments in his relationship with his wife. But all that is now obscured by his late-career betrayals. The same can be said of a long list of once venerated men and women wounded like Achilles in some vulnerable part of their humanity.
The more intimate and trusting our relationships have been, the more betrayal can blind us to the many rainbow moments the relationship held.
This is deeply true of our long-married, now-divorced friends. During the three decades we have known them, we shared countless laughs, sacred moments connected to the births and childhood of their sons, shared trips to Canada, and beautiful exchanges of poetry, letters, phone calls, as well as good news, and support during personal tragedies. We must now engage them separately.
Why do we so often insist on burying so many of the treasured moments of our lives under the rubble of acrimony? Can't the accomplishments of a long career be celebrated even if the career ended with some moments of ignominy?
Why do we let brief "evil" survive as the definition of a broken relationship while the good is interred in the bones of the past?
Gladly, there are exceptions. Every so often, I encounter a divorced couple who are getting along great together and who do, literally, celebrate the good times they once had. Periodically, I come across a fired caregiver and find they are able to focus on the gifts their work career offered.
These lucky few have found the answer. When we degrade every moment of a once-valued job or a relationship because of how it ended we have demeaned ourselves perhaps more than we have anyone else.
Fear traps us in shadows. Love can always light our path to another way of seeing. It is only Love that can help us rediscover and honor the hidden treasure that each of our valued relationships once held.
-Reverend Erie Chapman, M.T.S., J.D.
