We’ve sold the marital house, and with that a dream died.
We recently sold the house in which my ex-wife and I lived for seven or eight years. I left earlier, she left later, hence the seven or eight year figure. It was the second house we owned together. Truth be told, our dream died the death of a thousand cuts. Our marriage lasted 22 years, and we were in a romantic relationship for 26. I count as romantic even the years at the end when we were trying to patch things up.
The marital house was in a semi-rural area, on almost 9 acres of land. My wife retired soon after we bought the house. That was the plan all along. She is 20 years my senior. She was able to have a craft room for the first time in her life. She also had a rather large garden. We had two wood stoves in the house, and I was responsible for gathering the wood and processing it with my chainsaw and a log splitter.
As a matter of fact, I was responsible for a lot of the maintenance of the place. Not all of it, mind you. My wife spent a good amount of time on the riding mower, especially after my cancer struck. However, I did things like rerouting the duct work when we changed ranges. The old range was a downdraft range. Picking a downdraft range was one of the many stupid decisions that the previous owners made. We looked for a downdraft as a replacement, but there were very few models on the market, and they had tons of disadvantages. So I bit the bullet and rerouted the duct work. The new range was a sophisticated induction range, and updraft.
I also did the framing for a master bathroom remodel. The old bathroom had a shower and a jacuzzi bath in it, but we almost never used the bath. Moreover, both my wife and I were getting older, and we planned to stay in the house as long as we could. Yes, I know how ironic that sounds now that we’ve divorced, and the house is sold. So the remodel was going to do away with the bath, and only keep a curbless shower in there. We wanted a curbless shower because both of us had already had episodes in our lives when stepping over a curb was difficult, and we did not want a repeat of this problem. The guest bathroom had a shower if anyone wanted to shower anyway.
I did the framing, lowered the floor in the shower area, added the blocking necessary… and then… my cancer struck. So I did not complete it. My wife hired someone to finish it. I’ve seen it. It is a very nice bathroom. The bathroom of my dreams, actually. One that I do not get to enjoy.
I’ve done other odd jobs around the place. I’ve been responsible for clearing the paths into the forest when trees were blocking the way. I’ve installed an alarm system. I was responsible for the maintenance of the network inside the house. I installed cameras outside to keep an eye around the house.
Alas, that dream is done for. My wife and I started talking about divorce over a year ago. We got our divorce in March of this year. The house sold in June. We still need to split a joint investment account, and then we will make our separate ways in life. We’ve actually already started making our separate ways, but the disentanglement of our affairs is a process more than a single event.
My cancer was not the direct cause of our divorce. We had already started diverging a few years before my cancer. Neither of us stabbed the other in the back. We just slowly diverged and one day we realized that we were better apart than together.
My autism is a different matter. Neither my wife nor I even knew I was autistic. Truth be told, I think my marriage sheltered me from having to be an autistic man in an allistic world, but this is a topic for future articles. However, and I’ve explained it in another article that I’m going to link to below, some symptoms of my autism contributed to friction in our marriage:
The sale of our house marks the end of our life together, of what could have been, but wasn’t. Or maybe I should say that it was, for a while, because we really did love each other, but it did not last.
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