by Don Hall

Prior to recording a recent Literate ApeCast, Himmel and I talked a bit about the Kubler-Ross Five Stages of Grief. In regards to the demise of my third marriage and subsequent demolishing of the life I thought I was living, it turns out that I have mixed them up some, skipped one step altogether, and am now in the final act.

The stages are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. I think I went through Denial and Depression at the same time during the four months hiding in my one bedroom apartment in Vegas. I skipped Bargaining altogether and only recently got to Anger. So, what does Acceptance look like?

Before Apple got all on top of things photos-wise, I used Google Photos a lot. I got rid of it a few years ago because Google has become a predatory feature in the world of data sales but apparently had not deleted the cache of pictures taken over the years.

My iCloud only goes back as 2012 with exactly one photo of me getting a key lime martini in a high end bar with Vanessa Harris. I don't know why I kept it but I like the look on my face as well as the odd spectacle of having a bright green cocktail in hand. Looking at the shot reminds me of a day when Harris and I were wandering around together, telling stories, getting drunk in the day with booze and words. It was a good day and I suppose this one photo expands in my recollection.

The Google Photos account is less curated and more like a giant photo dump. A fair amount of duplicates exist in this digital desk drawer or suitcase and there are over 8,000 pictures of bits both large and small littered in the mix. The timeline went as far back as 2006. Eighteen years of my path suddenly thrust in my face.

As I did eight months ago when the sordid details of my third wife's secret life blew up in my face like sewage suddenly shooting straight up out the shower drain, I decided to cull every photo of her, of any hint we had been together, a purge of memories that revealed to me what a sham the whole thing was in effort to do something that felt like emotional chemotherapy. Kill the cancer, grow your hair back, reframe existence.

I used to keep screenshots of plane tickets as a backup and, in this moment, each represented the beginning of a hundred little getaways and vacations, holiday travel, and work related journeys. Before 2014, there were a lot of pictures of me. An embarrassing treasure of Narcissus, gazing into the pool of selfies, reveling in my transformative weight loss of that time when I dropped 80 pounds in 2007/2008. Also in tow were hundreds of inspirational phrases laid out on stock photos as reminders I suppose.

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
"Do no harm. Embrace possibility. Live to tell about it."
"Live the Dream. Endure the Nightmare."
and one of my favorites that seems to encapsulate both my desire for reminders to avoid being bogged down in convention and my tendency toward treating obstacles with unfettered aggression:
"Life is Short. Can you really say you've lived if you haven't punched a stupid person in the face?"

A shot of my friend Matt sleeping on my couch the summer he crashed for three months waiting for his fiancé to return from France. Carl Kasell posing with a bunch of the Carl plush dolls I ordered to sell for Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me!. A panorama shot of me standing on a Michigan beach taken by Alice.

Countless pics of performances of The Moth, BUGHOUSE!, LitMash, and the myriad events I produced for WBEZ all around Chicago. Family photos from Christmas and the Fourth of July—the shock of seeing my nephew (who died from a fentanyl overdose in 2020) when he was alive and happy was bittersweet but lovely. Joe and I roadtripping it to Kansas for my grandma's funeral.

Apparently, from 2008—2016 I had some bizarre desire to take brochure shots of bathroom graffiti in seedy bars all over Chicago.

Along the way I deleted photos of people who were friends at the time but ended up enemies. "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." Up until 2014, I saw a lot of me, a lot of my friends, a lot of life as it unfolded in the form of events and shows and pledge drives and time in the gym. I had already culled through the Alice pictures but strangely managed to still have a few shots of Katie whom I only dated for six weeks.

Sunday, May 11, 2014 was the day things changed. All of the inspirational phrases, carefully set in creative fonts, became pronouncements of love.

"She's mad but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire."
"And suddenly, all the love songs were about you."
"What we find in a soulmate is not something wild to tame but something wild to run with."
"You're kinda, sorta, basically pretty much always on my mind."

The tone shifted in the Google Photos slog through nostalgia. All of a sudden there were scores of pictures of her. The third wife. The fiancé after three dates. Out of the 8,000 stored images, nearly 5,000 were of her or us.

One of her quirks, I'll call it, was that she seemed to be living every one of her failed relationships as if each one had ended the day before. She was still angry at the high school boyfriend who dumped her, the blonde dreamboat who moved to D.C. leaving her behind, the porn photographer who "lost his sexual mojo." She would routinely rant about the frequently homeless guy she dated before meeting me who fetishized her, had a horse cock, and tried to smother her with a pillow once out of jealousy. The frustration of thwarted expectations sat within her all the time to be dredged up in random moments on random days to foul her mood and revisit that which still felt fresh and bleeding in her mind.

I never really understood this quirk as I can barely remember any of the bad times in my past relationships to the point that, when I do think about them, the simple narrative of why it worked and why it failed obfuscates any remembrance of anger or pain. The first ex-wife and I married too young and out of sense that that was what we were supposed to do. We did our best but, in the end, couldn't sustain it. The second ex-wife and I got married out of a transactional artistic arrangement and when I stopped producing shows for her to direct, she found someone else. Alice, while not a wife but a four-year off and on battle, couldn't get enough of sex with me but fundamentally didn't like me much. I stopped ruminating on the specifics of how's and why's and could see more good than bad within each failure.

My past is represented in scars, I thought. Hers is perpetually bleeding.

So I culled my Google Photos of the memories as thoroughly as I could. Countless pictures of the two of us on vacation—Jamaica, St. Thomas, New Orleans, Paris, London, Edinburgh, places in Michigan, Reno, Flagstaff, Harrisburg. Countless pictures of family holidays. Countless shots of her playing drums with various bands in various venues around Chicago. Poetry readings. Storytelling events. Medieval Times. Cirque du Soleil. Pub crawls with flights of beer. House parties.

There were at least several hundred pictures of her nude modeling she'd sent me. At least several hundred of the two of us posing for a couples selfie all over the place. An entire album of our Vegas wedding.

Through it all, I kept expecting to be overwhelmed by grief or anger or disillusionment. I wasn't.

On the day after we decided to divorce but the day before she confessed she'd been working as a prostitute for nearly three years, I told her that, while things didn't work the way we thought it would, ours was the best marriage and the most loved I'd ever lived. I meant it, it apparently meant a lot to her, and we both cried. The next day she unveiled the unthinkable and all of that sentiment was forgotten.

That's the thing about shock. If you're at least a little bit emotionally healthy, it wears off. Sure, it takes time to heal up, to get those bloody cuts to scab over and eventually scar, but it does wear off. "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

What I see was what everyone else saw. A strange but lovely couple. I was ridiculously and wholly in love with this woman. For five years in Chicago, we had an extraordinary partnership even with the personal quirks and curveballs thrown by life. What I see is a man in love and a woman doing her best to love him back. I see joy and laughter. I see mutual support. I see my family embrace her and she embrace them.

I see, for five years, between 2014 and 2019, the best marriage I'd ever had.

When my nephew died, I put together a video in memoriam for my sister. It included pictures of him from birth until shortly before he passed. One of the awful things I noticed in putting it together was that as his life got closer to the day of his death, his eyes started changing. He looked like someone going downhill. It was stark and obvious when no one really saw it at the time.

The Google Photos from the time we arrived in Vegas until the day I knew she decided to live her lie and then until we split reveal something similar. There are fewer pictures of her and the ones that were taken show her flipping the camera off or looking annoyed that I'm taking a picture at all. She starts wearing more and more makeup. Her clothing, which was always sort of a grunge 90's aesthetic, became more tattered and trashy. We took a day trip to Rhyolite, NV and there are forty pictures of the place and only three of her, six of me, and one of the two of us together. She looks unhappy in the four she's posing in.

Another quirk of hers was to subtly adopt the local accent of any place we visited. I first noticed it when we honeymooned in Jamaica. As soon as we got off the plane, her normal speech was suddenly musical in that Jamaican way. When she spoke to locals it became more pronounced. She did this in France and in London, too. Perhaps this assimilation was deeper than the accents but with the place. Las Vegas is a place of easy money, flexible morality, and an influx of tourists coming to have a fine, filthy time before going back to their homes and cubicles.

I'll never know what the truth was and it likely doesn't matter if I do. Getting rid of her photos from this specific digital dump felt more like packing up the clothing of someone who died to go to Goodwill. The woman for whom I collected hundreds of excerpts from Pablo Neruda and lovesick sayings died in February of 2020—I just didn't know until much later. I'll confess that I miss her but who she was rather than who she is and that's some Grade A mindfuckery.

I didn't see the change in her until it was long past the expiration date. I was looking but wasn't seeing what is now completely obvious through the photographs through our time together. I wouldn’t change a day with her for those first five years because I was in love and was with the person I was in love with. The person she chose to be once we got to Vegas is no one I ever wish to see again and so I delete all memory of her as completely as I can. I suppose that’s how all split ups are and the duality of our memories pervades the path forward.

Funny that, as I deleted thousands of reminders of her, I'm keeping all the inspirational sayings and even a few of the romantic ones because you never know who’s coming around the corner, right?