Bury the Dead

The first Redacted essay

I am so honored to share the first anonymous essay in the Redacted Substack column today. Weekly columns will feature a mix of one-word Tiny Truths, micro-essay Divorce Dispatches, and full-length essays.

Every writer’s privacy will be protected with a pseudonym. These writers are generously sharing their stories—releasing them to you, the reader, without their names attached to their work. I have been humbled and grateful to read dozens and dozens of submissions, and I will do my best to feature as many of them as I can. Thank you, writers, for trusting me with your stories.

Today’s Tiny Truth: How to Let it Go

Every time I tell the story, it moves further and further outside of me—and now I can finally let it go.
—Sanessa Stone

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

Bury the Dead

By Elizabeth Reed

“This is why we bury our dead,” my brother said thoughtfully through the phone. I sat in bed under a weighted blanket and two dogs, sick with the flu.

“I’m so tired of not being able to talk about things that need to be talked about,” I replied bitterly. I was having one of those days where I wanted to take a torch to the entire village, if there even was such a thing. I wanted to raise it over my head and scream with the rage of every woman who has ever been fucked over by a man in the history of the world. In this case, I was the recipient of a very passive fucking over. The kind with plausible deniability in spades. The gaslighting kind.

It was an Emperor’s New Clothes kind of fuckover, mothers shepherding children away from the crazy naked dude, covering their kids’ eyes and averting their own. Nothing to see here! Quick, get back inside your own houses!

Is there anything more pathetic than a broken-hearted middle-aged man having a nervous breakdown? Oh, yes. One who wields his heartbreak forged in the steel of rage and vengeance. One who is so bitter and unforgiving that he will poison his own well if only to get at mine. And if his children drink from it? That is my fault, according to the Emperor.

We are not given a handbook for how to deal with people experiencing mental health crises; we do not have a script for how to speak to someone with a personality disorder that they will never accept. When children return from their first overnight with their other “parent” and they are vomiting and hyperventilating, we are taught to default to the manual of “Do not say anything negative about your co-parent around your children.”

Did that apply to reports of your ex-husband screaming, “Your fucking mother tore this family apart” while publicly losing his shit as his traumatized children look on in horror? Is there a loophole for situations when your “co-parent” has already violated the terms?

These are rhetorical questions, of course. I did what I have always and would always do: I put my children’s mental health above any and all “rules” issued by the family court system, a woefully unregulated and wildly deficient institution. Had referees been available to me, I would have welcomed them onto the field in gratitude. Surely they could see clearly? But there are no referees. No court-appointed coaches or mandated family therapy. There is nobody watching out for us.

I had called my brother in a panic, blubbering that I didn’t know where to go from here. I don’t know what to do had become my mantra, although I knew damn well what to do. I would wake up every morning, put my blinders on, put one foot in front of the other the way we are supposed to, drive to the grocery store, boil water for pasta. But I felt like I had reached an impasse that morning as I collapsed in the backyard hammock, eight minutes away from the biggest panic attack I would ever have.

I had been swinging gently in the late winter sunlight, beholding the sight of my yard, which appeared to be part gopher habitat and part hobo camp. Surely the girls and I could take an afternoon and do some spring cleanup. When I wasn’t so sick. And they weren’t. When all the fickle stars aligned and everyone felt good and nobody was in crisis. God, would that day come?

Did my soon-to-be ex-husband know that his family—the one he repeatedly claimed I had “quit on”—was going down? That we were in a plane crash and he was the pilot? He hadn’t been a parent to our children since the day I asked him to leave. And suddenly the rage made me blind, and I couldn’t breathe. My chest was tight. My throat was crammed full of legal paperwork and therapist appointments and the 14-page file my daughter had created to document the horrors she witnessed, and I was choking on it. So I hyperventilated alone in the backyard and then dragged myself upstairs to call my lifeline: the brother who could see everything clearly.

“I had a life, and it’s gone,” I told him matter-of-factly. It wasn’t a life that I mourned per se, but it existed once, and now it didn’t. Poof, like that. Overnight. It changed in one night—one blurry, smoky, eerily calm, out of body, should we call the police kind of night.

“And some days,” I told him, “when I hit pause on the entire operation and zoom out, the magnitude of how fucked up everything is brings me to my knees. It’s like, one day I was living this way, and the next it was a whole new life. And I’m not allowed to talk about what really happened. Where is everybody? Nobody is helping me. What am I supposed to do?”

“You need to bury your dead,” my brother said. “This is why you all keep getting so sick. You haven’t been able to grieve this.”

We have been too busy surviving for nine months to grieve. I couldn’t see the day-to-day of it all, the way we can’t tell our children are growing until we look back. We took it one day at a time, recovery style, trying to rationalize that everything was normal enough until we arrived at a random day in the future when the March sun shone and the backyard was trashed and I realized we had been too busy surviving to have had a proper funeral.

The divorce rulebook-followers would probably be terribly concerned about my children and how openly we discuss the divorce and their father. “Should you be talking about this around the girls? What will they think?”

“They know,” I will reply. “They lived it.”

It was impossible for me to maintain the impeccable divorce boundaries the parenting classes championed. I wanted to. I agree that they are necessary and useful and healthy. But not for us. Because this divorce is not normal.

And my children are the Emperor’s children, and they need me to tell them the truth more than they need me to maintain the proper boundaries. The Emperor has no clothes, it’s true. Your father is not okay. This is not a normal situation. What happened today was not acceptable. It must have made you feel awful to hear him say that; do you want to talk about it?

I cannot stick to the Divorce Script, because the stakes are too high. The stakes are their mental health, their trust in themselves, their confidence in their own intuition. I have to be their partner in this. This is like watching someone lose their mind. This is like a death. They know it, in their bones, and you cannot tell them otherwise.

“I want a Daddy hug,” one of them mourns.
“Sweetheart, you can go give him a hug tonight,” I remind her.
“That’s not him,” she replies emphatically, through tears.

She is not wrong. I cannot tell her that the Emperor is dressed in finery. He is not. And she knows it. He is gone, and we cannot bury our dead. We lug him around behind us like an albatross, and then we become the Emperor. We have to pretend we are not dragging a corpse, pretend we are not infected with a secret that is invisible. We have to avert our own eyes, tell ourselves half-truths about the fact that we can do hard things and this is just a rough patch. When in fact, it is a nightmare, and nobody is coming to rescue us.

Who do we protect with our silence? My girls’ father is dead, but he is still breathing and sometimes brings them fast food. Who do we bury?

I am furious at our lack of village, the one I’d longed to burn to the ground had it existed. Where are the men who call themselves his friends, or is it irrelevant because they are the council in his echo chamber, drinking from the same poisoned well? Are they the same male heads of household who quietly convince their emotional wives that it’s not their problem and they should stay in their lane? Who repeat the mantra, “There’s nothing we can do. We shouldn’t get involved; it’s a family matter.” Nothing is ever their business. I have news for them—when you are a woman who chooses to abandon the structure and safety of the nuclear family, you quickly become nobody’s business.

My therapist asks if we should name this Legacy Burden, this 1950s model of “behind closed doors” and keeping our noses out of our neighbors’ business. I bitterly complain that at least in the 50s, they brought casserole. I would like a fucking casserole. “It’s like the opposite of a village. It’s the Un-Village,” I decide.

Mother Teresa proclaims that “if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other.” Oh, how we have forgotten. Our insular nuclear family pods allow for book clubs and ladies’ nights, block parties and BBQs, and sometimes someone gets too drunk at a child’s birthday party and confesses in whispers that her marriage is a sham. When another woman files for divorce the next week, the women stop talking. It’s insidious, this admission that we need more than we are getting under the confines of our suburban roofs, the silent acknowledgement that there is a flaw in the system.

When I’d passionately declared to my husband years earlier that I was going to speak to the man—our friend, his friend— that my best friend was divorcing, he shook his head. “Don’t do it. It’s none of your business,” he prescribed. “It will only make things worse.” What would happen if we stopped listening to this impotent advice? What if we became each other’s business again? What if we burned down the Un-Village?

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