America lost one of its most gifted writers in 2016 when 70-year-old Pat Conroy died of pancreatic cancer.
Conroy’s fiction (The Prince of Tides, The Water is Wide, The Great Santini) was primarily rooted in the tumult of his own upbringing as a “military brat,” and of the American South that he called home for most of his life.
Conroy also knew firsthand the pain of a broken love relationship.
More than half of American couples who make serious promises to each other – whether or not they choose to get married – ultimately go their own way.
About the only people who have reason to be cheered by this trend are lawyers, moving companies, and Country Western songwriters.
It takes someone with Conroy’s skills to plumb the depths of relational brokenness. Here’s what he wrote in Atlanta Magazine after his first marriage dissolved:
When I went through my divorce I saw it as a country, and it was treeless, airless; there were no furloughs and no holidays.
I entered without passport, without directions and absolutely alone. Insanity and hopelessness grew in that land like vast orchards of malignant fruit.
There are no metaphors powerful enough to describe the moment when you tell the children about divorce. Divorces without children are minor-league divorces.
To look into the eyes of your children and to tell them that you are mutilating their family and changing all their tomorrows is an act of desperate courage that I never want to repeat.
It is also their parents’ last act of solidarity and the absolute sign that the marriage is over. It felt as though I had doused my entire family with gasoline and struck a match.
The three girls entered the room and would not look at me or Barbara. Their faces, all dark wings and grief and human hurt, told me that they already knew. My betrayal of these young, sweet girls filled the room.
They wrote me notes of farewell, since it was I who was moving out. The notes said, “I love you, Daddy. I will visit you.”
When I read them, I did not see how I could ever survive such excruciating pain.
It’s notable that Conroy uses the word “excruciating.” It’s a made-up word that literally means “out-of-the-cross.”
It goes without saying that the person who has experienced the depths of excruciating pain is the One who died on Calvary.
God makes this astonishing promise: “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).
Even when we feel alone, we are not alone.
And, by the grace of his crucified Son, we can survive the deepest wounds.
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