At 20-years-old I made my second trip out to New York City. After five days crashing on my friend’s couch, I took the bus to Montclair, New Jersey to visit my favorite aunt, her husband and their two kids. They had recently moved from England to Jersey for my uncle’s high-powered job. My uncle spent long days in the city working but was always there as a father. He worked in the music industry and we shared the same taste in bands. We could always talk music, plus he was smart and easy to be around. He was the perfect juxtaposition to my aunt who was always making jokes, teasing and talking about her travels. My aunt was a school teacher who had spent her 20s teaching children in Africa. That’s where she met her husband when she was hitch-hiking in the 1970s.
On the second night into the Montclair trip I was laying in the spare bedroom they had set up for me and reading. It was 11pm. My aunt suddenly came bursting into my room in her night gown. She buried herself into the blankets beside me. She was sobbing. I had never seen her cry before.
“He’s going to leave us,” she choked out. “Everything is fucked up.”
My aunt had always been so strong. Everything in her life and marriage appeared perfect to me. I did not know what to say. I was going through my first real break-up at the time, and suddenly my heartbreak seemed minuscule compared to the potential of her losing her husband of more than 20 years.
I let her cry and just listened. She waved her hand over to the bookshelf which was cluttered with family photo albums. An entire wall of their history.
“Might as well just burn them,” she said. “It’s all going to be gone anyways.”
Her boys, my cousins, were young then. But still old enough to understand when the divorce finally happened. When it did a year later, it was devastating.
I bring this up, because I recently finished reading Kim Gordon’s memoir Girl In A Band. Gordon is best known as the bassist for Sonic Youth, a noise rock band she started in 1981 with her husband Thurston Moore. Gordon emerged from the New York art scene, made a name for herself as the iconoclastic, stoic Mother of Cool who did everything from co-designing her own clothing label X-Girl, producing Hole’s debut album Pretty On The Inside and publishing books of her art. Gordon and Moore were the “it” couple of rock. In my 20s, I looked up to them as this impossibly perfect union of creativity, business and true love. In 2011, the gossip swirled that Moore had cheated on Gordon. Fans were curious. Were mom and dad done? A few years later, they announced their divorce (and the end of Sonic Youth), then both started to open up in interviews about the end of their relationship. It was real.
“The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact,” Gordon wrote in Girl In A Band, “who gave younger musicians the hope they could outlast a crazy rock ’n’ roll world, was now just another cliche of middle-aged relationship failure – a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.”
Though the book chronicles Gordon’s entire life from growing up in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Toronto and settling in New York, the last part of the book addresses what conspired between her and Moore. A story fans all wanted to hear, even if they would not admit it (human beings are gossip-hungry creatures pretending we have too much tact to care). After 30 years being a band, 27 years of marriage and 17 years of raising a child, they split. Moore had an affair with a publisher who first took an interest in courting Gordon to edit a book on mix tapes but she declined working with her. After finding some texts on his phone, the couple tried to fix it with counseling, but Moore kept lying and secretly seeing the other woman. Although Gordon could have thrown her ex-husband and his new girlfriend under the bus tastelessly, she did not. She spoke about him with grace and little distain or envy for his mistress. I heard Moore is mad about the book.
I know that divorce happens. It happens more than people stay together. However, there is something wrenching about couples splitting up after decades together. After an entire lifetime, one person decides they can’t do it anymore. That they do not want any of it.
I never thought about these things until I found the person I decided to spend my life with. I admired the strength of my aunt, picking up the pieces of her life after they had been shattered, and Gordon who had to deal with the loss of her band and husband under the prying eyes of the public. The rejected move on because they have to.
We are expected to handle the loss of a relationship with grace. It’s really hard to take the high road when you are so emotionally bruised that all you want to do is scream at your ex, attack the person who meddled in your marriage and then, drink yourself into a grave. Being self-aware, calm and together when your world has become chaos is some next-level zen shit that most of us can barely muster.
Swans are monogamous birds who develop relationships that can last years, sometimes for their entire lives. But swans mate for survival, not romance. They are birds, after all, so things like migrating, territory, incubation and reproduction take president over the human concept of love. Humans like to believe we mate for love, but we are just as basic as the swans on so many levels.
But swans don’t have to worry about the aftermath of loss the way we do. They don’t have to say, “I’m fine”, and remember to be graceful in public. They don’t have to bite their tongues. They don’t have to sit in a cold conference room while a divorce lawyer mediates an agreement for once-shared assets. They don’t have to feel the feelings and face everyone else’s curiosity and pity. The rejected are strong because they have to be.
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