Greetings from Houston, as my Camino pilgrimage begins. I’m in a good mood! I’m anticipating the adventure, which ends in exactly 50 days by sprinkling some of Janet’s ashes on the Spanish coast on the anniversary of her death last year, God willing. I begin walking on Saturday July 20, but my pilgrimage begins now. I pilgrim to the starting point through Munich, Geneva, Biarritz, then to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port (SJPP) on the southern edge of France at the foot of the Pyrenees. Then 47 days of walking.

Here’s a reflection I finished on the first flight regarding my motives and goals. I cover your prayers. And apologies in advance that most of my writing will be for my private journal but I hope to provide a few updates as I am led…

Till Death Do Us Part

The phrase “til death do us part” seems so obtuse and out of place when you pledge it to each other on your wedding day. It’s like one of those obscure clauses in a legal contract that you hardly pay attention to and certainly prefer to ignore.

Even after you actually “part” through death, at first the phrase doesn’t mean much. Your love doesn’t end, your grief is real and raw, your memories and plans automatically include your dearly beloved just as before. Your choices and habits are just as intertwined as ever with the negotiated compromises you carved out together over the decades. Initially, you need those familiar routines and thought processes to keep going without exerting too much mental energy; you are glad to proceed as usual and simply put one foot in front of the other.

Yet ever so slowly, you begin to realize that some of your personal preferences may be divergent from those previously shared routines. Sleeping and waking patterns, eating habits, television shows… the thousand happy compromises you made to gladly bend toward your spouse’s happiness are no longer necessary.

You slowly come to realize, hundreds of times, that death has indeed parted—untethered—the two of you. The bothersome clause in your wedding vows that was too terrible to think about has actually kicked in. The marriage contract has expired. The dread eventuality eventually came to pass, and now all those definitions of yourself as half of a wonderful, loving, dynamic couple are in the past. They are no longer true, much as you want to cling to them—cling to what you’ve known for so long, to what you worked so hard to help create.

In our family, we still laugh about an incident from 40 years ago with friends of ours. They had two small children to whom we had just offered some cheese. The younger one, Katie, turned to her sister and asked, “Laura, do we like this?” Katie didn’t know her own preferences—she didn’t even want to have her own preferences. Her self-definition was inextricably tied to being half of a sibling pair. In thousands of ways, small and large, you’ve done the same with your spouse for decades, and now this self-definition crumbles, ever so slowly, one erosion after another, until you realize the facade cannot be repaired and must be allowed to fall away over time, eventually revealing the “you” that you have become over all those years, shaped uniquely by your marriage but no longer subsumed and hidden by the superstructure of your marital identity.

And so a time comes when it’s appropriate to honor yet release the crumbles of that expired superstructure, to face the future as that individual you already had become underneath but which was somewhat hidden by the exoskeleton of your coupleness. It’s time to crawl out from that covering, one which served its purpose so well and now is molting off. It’s time to say some final goodbyes to your expired marriage.

This is the goal of my Camino pilgrimage. I wish to honor Janet, celebrate and commemorate our marriage, and also turn my face from the beautiful past towards the unknown future—full of gratitude for the past and expectation for what’s ahead.

Lord willing, I will reach land’s end (Finisterre) on the one-year anniversary of Janet’s death and leave some of her ashes there—ashes that will symbolize the end of our 50 years together. With God’s help, I will leave Spain having fully honored and celebrated our union, having faced the reality of that dreaded wedding-vow clause without dread, but instead with gratitude for all we had before the clause came to pass, and now firmly facing the future — as I know both Janet and God want and expect of me.

Cory
July 2024