It is done.

And to my utter amazement, his pick-mes want to protect him, as if I am a danger to him or them.

Y’all know he’s a 45 year old man hanging around 20-somethings, right?

That’s creep behavior.

There are a lot of things about my marriage and Jeff and his behavior towards me that I still have not shared with anyone other than my therapist.

Bully behavior.

It’s just the irony of how I have to hold myself so strong and can ignore and push down how I feel, which is something I’m able to do pretty easily considering I’ve learned to ignore pain from my disease for 30 years.

But it takes its toll. My therapist advised me that I am not safe around Jeff at home to be vulnerable as a person, with my emotions, with my grief. That he is an unsafe person for me. And yet these 20 years younger pick-mes want to protect him when he has destroyed me, a woman he professed to love at points, through a death of a thousand cuts.

He told me that he thought my mechanical heart valve ticked too loud; in the heart that has loved him despite everything, too loud are the metal doors that literally keep me alive, my heart beating and ticking out time,

He has no heart. I say this in having spent  17 years together, with 13 as married.

No woman deserves what I have endured as I loved him, despite the hurt, the harm,  the avoidance.

But it is done.

I am no longer his wife.