Mr. Virgo was hubby number three for me. My starter marriage was relatively brief…just three years. My second marriage lasted 21 years. Mr. Virgo died just three weeks shy of our sixth wedding anniversary.
For me, the first divorce was probably the easiest to work through because I instigated it. I also was quite young at 23. The second was brutal. I was 47 and very much in love with my second husband when he ended the marriage. I was devastated. Then…I lost Mr. Virgo and I realized what devastation really felt like.

Grief is a path everyone walks at some point in their lives. Not only does everyone experience grief differently, no two grief experiences are alike within the same individual. I grieved deeply over the end of my second marriage and I believe it gave me tools to help when Mr. Virgo died. If one were to “compare” the grief experiences between the loss of divorce and the loss of death….death is permanent. You will never have the joy of seeing your loved one again. The sting of rejection in a divorce you didn’t want and the pain of seeing the one you love over and over and over, likely with someone new, brings salt to an open wound. You grieve the loss of divorce in a different way.

Grief breaks us wide open. The life we planned is gone. Our hearts are broken in a million pieces at our feet. We sit, staring at the remnants on the floor and wonder how we can possibly pick those pieces back up and put them back together again. In time, we slowly gather the broken bits but the finished object is more like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces than the whole heart you had before. And…here’s where hope comes in….when you sit in the darkness of your broken heart, there comes a day when you notice the beams of light shining out through the cracked places. You slowly realize you can glow again. You can shine. Never quite the same, but you can shine.

My faith is what held me together when I lost Mr. Virgo. It took a lot of miles on the open road to see how God knitted my broken heart. The cracks are His way of letting others see Him in me. There is purpose in all things, no matter how painful they are. And that gives me peace.

❤️

“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”‭‭

Psalms‬ ‭34:18‬ ‭ESV‬‬