Open Heart Surgery

in the year of the Snake

Andy and I broke up in January.

That sentence, so short, so abrupt, does little to describe the last 10 years of our 24-year-long relationship, and how we’ve come to this place.

I’ve struggled to write publicly about our marriage, and have usually settled on avoidance. The truth is, in this space, I’ve been writing around the most central, influential, and devastating part of my life. I’ve not known how to disclose honestly and vulnerably while simultaneously honoring Andy’s privacy, respecting and loving him, and protecting the world of our little family. Neither Cleo nor he has asked to be a part of this repository of my feelings, and telling our story solely from my perspective seems unfair in so many ways.

This tension has often left me in a state of stuckness. I have a lot to say about partnership, marriage, and love —and I am also wary of the public sphere. There is an element of the sacred in our experience that I’ve been unable to breathe into this format, into this platform. I worry about who will read what I’ve written, how it will be weaponized against me or those I love. And I worry that what I share will not be enough, that it will fail to adequately describe the complexity, beauty, and tragedy in all of it. I’m trying to understand the geography of this sadness—its latitudes and longitudes. If I were a better poet, I imagine that I could begin to touch the edges of what needs to be said. (But, I’m a fledgling poet at best.)

Lacking the words to express my grief, I made an altar to love. And I prayed before it.

EROS, ADMIRATION, COMPASSION Stoneware, porcelain, gold leaf, glass, cedar, rose quartz, underglaze, metal chain, tobacco; 2025

I am the snake that just shed a layer of skin; my parts sensitive and tender.

Each conversation, each encounter with a stranger, friend, or loved one, has the potential to harm and wound. My friend Evan describes this sensation as being made entirely of raw flesh, while everyone around you is trying to handle you with salt on their hands. In the midst of deep grief, I’ve become a playground for people to project all of their insecurities and unconscious fears and judgments about marriage, relationships, and love.

Add that to the swirl of chaos and malice in our social and political world, and all I’ve been capable of doing lately is putting one foot in front of the other and retreating into spaces where I can be quiet and still, and allow this part of me to die.

In many ways, I’ve been building a personal toolkit for accepting this process of surrender for a while. When I came to the realization that I could neither shift nor change the systems and structures of public education I considered unjust and cruel, and that the job was taking too much from me, I stepped away from the career I’d built over 20 years, releasing that particular identity. It was neither easy nor painless, but I allowed it to happen. In the space that was left, I oriented my life around supporting people in grief and death. I started working with young children and adults on developing creative practices that bring joy and meaning into our lives, and went back to school, something that seemed impossible 5 years before.

Now, I am allowing a great love to die and become something different. The process is brutal and indescribably sad. And, inevitably, something else will come in.

THE WEB Metal leaf on paper, 15”x27”, 2025

Last week was the first time that I lived outside of our home while still being in Portland. It’s strange to wake up in an unfamiliar room, in the same town where you live, knowing that your child, your cats, and your former husband are asleep a few miles away, and you are not there.

This is a list of things I did during that time:

I dragged a very random assortment of food items from the fridge at home in a large canvas bag to stock the fridge at my bachelor pad (aka: a friend’s apartment in NW Portland). That included: yogurt, coffee, cashews, white rice, a bag of kale from the garden, corn tortillas, an apple and two mandarins, popcorn, Tillamook cheddar cheese, eggs, oat milk, and butter. A good friend who is in the middle of a divorce told me the way to do it is to cook a pot of soup the first day and then eat that. I cook most dinners for my family, so it’s always weird when I transition to dinners of popcorn with nutritional yeast eaten standing up for dinner. Maybe I’ll make soup next time. Or maybe I won’t.

I forgot the jacket I wear every day, and resisted the urge to go immediately home to get it.

I worked, and responded to a lot of emails, though not as much as usual because it was the end of spring break.

I swam one morning at my usual time: 5:30 am. I cried in the car on the way. I also realized that one of the men who swims at the same time I do is a musician in a band (I saw him playing at a Narouz festival the previous week). I love it when the aperture on a person is widened, and what’s there is fucking great! He not only wears a speedo, he plays many instruments! We contain multitudes.

I brought my pillow (aka: Pillie) despite the fact that it’s pretty high maintenance/insane to travel with a pillow. And yes, she is personified. That’s how much I love her and the bacteria my drool has been breeding for over 20 years. I wash her regularly, but the situation is still nasty as fuck under the microscope. I don’t care. That is the level of my devotion.

I brought two books with me, and read neither. The two books: Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying are both excellent, and I am reading them at about 1/55th of the rate that I usually read. Instead, I re-watched the entire first season of White Lotus on my laptop. It’s still great, and for the record, it was/is a fantastic way to numb. No regrets.

I deleted IG a week before I arrived so I wouldn’t check it while I was there. I didn’t and didn’t miss it.

I took 0 pictures.

I was angry and tired a lot, and also completely intoxicated by spring flowers. Everything here is glowing green and mossy. It’s the time of the year when nature fights back. It’s as if the cholorphyl is shooting through my veins. Suddenly I’m harpooned back into relationship with plants. And that feels good. So much has felt so, so bad.

I talked on the phone to three different people and climbed many secret stairways in NW Portland. It was mostly very rainy on all my walks. One time I wore the enormous but also marginally stylish poncho I impulse bought during the first winter of the pandemic (great decision); one time I carried an umbrella.

I cried a lot with more depth of feeling than I’ve ever experienced before.

I didn’t smoke any weed— which was a good move. Sometimes cannabis feels beneficial to me in terms of reducing my anxiety, and it always is an extremely creative and body-centered space for me, but I also rely on it to self-soothe. My teacher for Eastern Philosophies and Death, Tenzin Rinpoche, would call this the pain identity in expansion. It provides me with an interesting paradoxical relationship between feeling into my emotions in a more intense way while simultaneously numbing me to them. So, in the interest of not playing roulette with my emotional health, I decided not to partake.

I walked around NW Portland with a new friend. We both live on the east side, so it felt like being tourists. Neither of us had ever been to the Saturday Market downtown (I’ve lived in Portland for 20 years) so we walked there together. It felt exactly like what I’ve always imagined it to be. We hung out at the drum circle watching a youngish black man with dreads teach an old goateed white guy how to dance. That felt important.

I went to my dance class and jumped around like I was in a pentecostal revival. I got very sweaty. I had respite from the pain for awhile.

I didn’t read or engage with the news at all during my stay. I can’t right now. The heartbreak is too big to engage with everything that I know will split me open further. It’s not naivety or not-caring— it’s the very opposite. I want to survive. So yes, back in my little safe hole until my new skin has grown.

A friend took me out to lunch in Montavilla and I snotted and cried a lot while we ate salads. She was kind and thoughtful, and I cried some more. The server dealt well with it. Then we stopped by La Bouffe International Market and I looked very closely at Turkish delight and wondered about who loves Turkish delight and what their reasoning might be. When I went back to the apartment, I felt really, really depleted and cared for at the same time.

I thought a lot about the last scene in the movie Anora.

I sat on my yoga mat and rolled around a lot. I did my nightly yoga and I was mostly unfocused. Sometimes I’d stop in the middle of a pose and completely check out. Sometimes it was to cry, or look something up on the internet. Or, to make a phone call. I also practiced a grounding and protection meditation twice a day. I was not distracted for those.

I had a few unintentionally hard conversations with people I love. Like I said, being this raw and trying to navigate how to talk about this thing that is happening without being hit with emotional shrapnel is no joke.

I laid on the big carpet on the living room floor listening to Women Who Run with the Wolves and the nerdy and totally great podcast This Jungian Life. I was supposed to be reading for school but I just couldn’t do it. I listened to a lot of music.

Two of the days, I made it to the studio. One of the days, I cried by the bisqueware talking to one of my friends there. Her kindness and the quality of her listening was incredible, but crying in public is a thing. I felt spent afterwards. Wrung out. I didn’t really make anything that day. The next time I went in, I was able to focus, and that felt like a gift. Another escape into creative flow.

I helped babysit a beloved three year-old friend with some other friends for a couple of hours. It’s easy to feel joy in the presence of three-year-olds. They also have a lot of big feelings.

I spent Friday night in the apartment with a friend listening to Sade and talking shit and laughing a lot. I drank two glasses of wine and had a shitty hangover the next day; it didn’t do me any psychological favors.

I tried to do a lot of calendaring: digital and paper. I tried to think into the near future when I’ll be able to have a better idea of what a week, or a month, might look like. Right now, I’m back in what I’m calling “first months of the pandemic” future planning. I’m existing in a one foot in front of the other time scale.

I curled up under a down comforter and took inventory of the 24 years: 1 child; 2 lost cats, 3 dead cats, 2 living cats; a bedroom, a cabin, a tent, a house in constant renovation, a 4-Square, a Victorian with a hot tub, a 10 year project home, a craftsman guarded by two cedars and a white oak, and an apartment on Murano; 4 gardens; bookshelves stuffed full of books; walls, cabinets, and an attic full of art; a basement and a garage packed with tools, 1 bazillion bikes, house plants, lawn mowers, art installations, boxes of clay; thousands of cups of coffee; so many vessels; family; friends; careers; and all the days and months and years.

Spring flowers from the garden

In those days away, I do a lot of thinking.

I take refuge from my emotions by trying to understand the situation from a more removed perspective. And what I get to is this:

The unraveling of a marriage is also the dismantling of a dream. With every piece of the construction of the relationship you build a story about the future you will inhabit. When it all falls apart, you must allow each part of that story to disintegrate. Each piece is a small death to mourn.

Grieving the end of a great love is also grieving the promise of what that love was supposed to mean: That your relationship and the love within would buttress you against the horrors of the world—against loneliness—that it would provide you with security and a system of checks and balances that would serve as guidance for navigating life. That the nuclear family could ever be enough.

The breakdown of a relationship is also an extinction of a type of hope. Hope lives in the future, so when a relationship comes to an end, so must the hopes about it. That’s when you find yourself alone in a friend’s apartment, realizing that the illusions about what you thought your life would look like must die.

Amidst all this grief is the day-to-day hustle. The taxes, the bills, the work, the soccer practices, the meals that must be cooked. There is laughter and silliness and a lot of loudly played music, cats to pet, and a garden. An extraordinarily beautiful garden.

So you show up for your kid, grounding into the firmament of your motherhood in order to support her as she grapples with the unwinding of her own dream of the future. You hug her and kiss her and make her favorite foods and give her space when she needs it. You take her thrifting and you fight, because she’s a moody 8th grader whose parents are splitting up. And you’re the parent. You try not to slime her with any of your unpredictable sadness.

You try not to be scared. You tell yourself: This is why I’ve been teaching myself to breathe, and move, and make art, to build community, support grievers, and tend death. Yes, everything seems to be breaking in the world and in your heart, but it’s gonna be ok.

And still it’s the hardest and saddest thing you’ve ever done.

That is all for now, friends. If you feel inclined to reach out (and I’m all in favor of love), please be gentle.

xoxo, Belle