The Karma Bus Arrived And I Feel Bad for Him
At last the karma bus came for her ex, but instead of feeling vindicated or even meh, she feels grief.
***
Dear Chump Lady,
The karma bus has arrived and I am struggling.
Ex-FW, who is in his mid-70s, has had a series of strokes from which he may not recover. The Other Woman (a retired nurse) has been living with him part-time and has made it clear she’s unable to provide the full-time care he’ll need if he survives. He is currently in a hospital and is having difficulty recognizing family.
Ironically, their affair began while she was married to his late best friend. FW was there when her husband died.
I am having flashbacks to D-day(s) and the years until I filed for divorce.
I’ve been no contact with FW and his family, because blood is thicker than water. My former brother-in-law reached out to a mutual friend to update me and he (BIL) and I had a caring conversation about prognosis and legal matters.
There are some very cruel things I could say to the OW and to his family. I made an appointment to see a therapist as a relief valve so that won’t happen. I don’t plan on seeing FW, who does not need my venom or tears.
Apparently, this is called “disenfranchised grief”.
I’m remembering the best parts of our 30-year marriage with no appropriate place to mourn it or be truly supported.
Will death bring closure? I suspect they may invite me to the funeral, if he dies. I will probably be a comma (behind her) in the obituary. The final sh*t sandwich.
Stepbystep
***
Dear Stepbystep,
I don’t think death brings closure. There’s just time and acceptance. Closure implies — voila! — you get over it. Whereas I think we just gradually incorporate loss into a new reality. Grief can trip you up at any time. (I’m trying to avoid the pop psychology “grief is nonlinear.” But it is.)
I tend to think of grief as an invisible bucket of slop you’re trying to balance on your head. If you stumble, the slop goes splat. So, you clean up and try again. Mourning a FW is carrying an invisible bucket of disenfranchised grief on your head. Calling a therapist is you trying to mitigate the potential splat damage. Which is very kind and mature of you.
The karma bus is perverse.
I don’t know who keeps the karmic timetables (assuming you believe in such things), but those cosmic comeuppances rarely arrive when you want them. Instead, the karma bus — in this instance, a frail and suffering FW — presents itself when you’re long past the desire for justice. Now you feel sorry for the guy. Now you’re able to gloss over his betrayals and all his f*ckwittery and think of the good times.
I’m remembering the best parts of our 30-year marriage with no appropriate place to mourn it or be truly supported.
Of course there were good times.
FWs have hooks. You’d have to be a total idiot to invest in someone completely without merit. Chumps wouldn’t pick me dance if they didn’t think at some point that FWs had value.
Look at it this way: You had the early good years. She gets strokes and end of life chaos. If she has good times, they’re going to be eclipsed by recent memories of adult diapers and hospice caregiving.
I suspect they may invite me to the funeral, if he dies. I will probably be a comma (behind her) in the obituary. The final sh*t sandwich.
The Other Woman writes his obituary.
Of course she’ll craft it to whatever narrative she wants. STOP PICK ME DANCING. Who cares what kind of billing you get? You know your history and you know this man is a cheater who doesn’t share your values.
This reminds me of a story of an older friend of mine. Her first husband left her in the 1970s for his secretary (a total cliche). The secretary dumped him within a year. Then he married his third wife. My friend tried to be friendly For The Children and the ex. It wasn’t the third wife’s fault he’d been a FW. I never understood this bonhomie, but they were sophisticated academics.
Then the FW dies. And my friend goes to the funeral — the mother of his children. AND NO ONE MENTIONS HER. Not in the obituary. Not in the eulogy. Never once. Anywhere. She is completely erased from the story. After 20 years with this guy, two kids, and decades of “friendship.” She was FURIOUS.
Her impression management was no longer needed.
That’s what they really think of you, chump.
My point is, you don’t want to go to this funeral or read that obituary and see yourself erased. If you go, understand you’re doing it for your OWN reasons, not for any validation from them. You’re not part of their story, except as the obstacle to their happiness. When you’re having misty watercolor memories, remember how they treated you.
The Other Woman (a retired nurse) has been living with him part-time and has made it clear she’s unable to provide the full-time care he’ll need if he survives.
I don’t have misty watercolored memories, so I can find this hilarious. Oh FW, did you trade your faithful wife for a fair-weather Schmoopie? I love this for you.
Ironically, their affair began while she was married to his late best friend. FW was there when her husband died.
So, as his best friend was dying, he was f*cking that guy’s wife? Or put another way: As her husband was dying, Schmoopie was cheating on him?
They both deserve all the tire treads of the Karma bus.
The only thing that would make this story better is if as your ex-FW is dying, Schmoopie is both denying him full care AND cheating on him. But as he doesn’t have the cognitive ability to recognize her, the full horror wouldn’t register anyway.
There are some very cruel things I could say to the OW and to his family.
Your absence says everything that needs to be said. The giant void in his life of a faithful partner, in sickness and in health, is visible to EVERYONE. Let them connect the dots. Let them sit with that discomfort. If you said anything, it would detract from the big lesson of his shitty life choices.
Karma bus — or consequences? They earned them. I’m glad he’s in your past. Please let him stay there. He’ll probably be looking for a new nurse soon.
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If you’re invited to the funeral, don’t go. I don’t think you stand anything to gain honoring the memory of your abuser or playing nice with his enablers.
I think sometimes we mourn terrible people even this late in the game because on some level, we’ve been holding out hope that the terrible person would wake up, take responsibility for their evil deeds, and change. Death is the final acknowledgment that no, this terrible person was committed to being terrible and they literally took it to the grave.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow but we need to accept these people are horrible and beyond redemption. That’s your closure.
As for your ex’s troubles, well, he earned them. Apparently he married a woman who connects just as shallowly as he does. I don’t know if karma exists, but I do know it’s very hard to escape a lifetime of bad choices.
My aunt’s cheater quit his fabulously wealthy job to get out of child support and spent the next decade suing her about it. He never paid a dime. Now my cousins tell me he and his mistress are suffering health complications from living with black mold but they’re too broke to move.
Meanwhile, it’s coming up on twenty years since my D-Day. My ex is a 60-year old Peter Pan: still broke, still irresponsible, and chaos follows him like a dark cloud. Debt, eviction, lawsuits, you name it. Last year, he moved into a house which was destroyed within 24 hours by a freak tornado.
I don’t feel bad for these people. I wasn’t responsible when they were hurting me or my family, and I’m not responsible now. We can’t control other people or their choices to destroy themselves and everything around them, we can only get the hell away from them and stay gone.
Sometimes I think that I would like, like the bad fairy in Sleeping Beauty, to appear at my ex’s funeral when that happens and provide the equivalent of the bad fairy’s curse, by telling those assembled and singing his praises who didn’t see and experience what I did, exactly what I did see and experience. It’s a very satisfying revenge fantasy. But I know that’s all it is: a fantasy.
The closest I might get to that revenge is simply to attend the funeral, if there is one, with my son, and sit beside him, which would at least assert my permanent effect on my ex’s life, while my very presence would cast a pall on the praise-fest. If my son doesn’t ask me to attend, I’ll just be the shadow mother and let my son’s presence speak for my existence. What I never would do would be to join in the praise-fest and pretend for form’s sake that what he did never happened.)
Here’s what I want to know about this letter to CL from Step-byStep. Why–what possible reason–has the ex-brother-in-law thought she needed to have an update on her ex’s condition and prognosis after his series of strokes? I fully doubt the ex BIL contacted her out of concern for her–for what possible reason would she “need to know”? What did the ex BIL hope to gain–and by whom–from breaking her carefully maintained no contact to apprise her of her ex’s condition and his need? Makes me wonder if the family is casting about for how to provide care for him and was hoping she might be moved to return and provide the care his schmoopie declines to give.
OP, he’s getting what he deserves. Don’t go to his funeral. It’s fine to remember the good times, but also remember what he did to you. This man does not deserve your good thoughts. He deserves exactly what he’s getting.
I don’t consider bad health issues Karma. Health issues can be a result of life decisions for sure; but I just can’t consider them a punishment. I have known too many wonderful people who suffer. We get old things start to break.
But either way I would have never gone to my ex’s funeral, even if he had a formal funeral. (which he didn’t) I cried, when he died, not because of who he was when he died; but for the years I knew him, and because he was my sons dad. I think having normal feelings is good.
I agree about closure, in fact I don’t give closure anymore credence than I do Karma. In general I do believe you reap what you sow. But I also think sometimes you reap things that you just didn’t deserve. Both good and bad. But we don’t get to see everything.
To me it’s not necessarily the health issues indicating karma, but that schmoopie is steering clear of full time caregiving. She cheated on one dying husband and isn’t about to nurse the affair partner FW. If the FW hadn’t discarded his loyal wife appliance he’d have a loving caregiver.
Male FW rarely end up with quality partners. The FW family are probably trying to see if OP chump can be roped into caregiving.
I think the karma is that the FW has no one able or willing to care for him properly. He had a loving wife he treated horribly and now has schmoopie who is not much help. Consequences.
This. I’ve also noticed cheaters tend to treat their bodies the same way they treat everything else in their lives.
Bad things do happen to good people (we’re all here because somebody betrayed us, after all). But cheaters have a pattern of irresponsibility and impulsiveness that tends to rack up consequences over time. It’s very hard to escape that unless someone has a lot of money and power, and even that isn’t a guarantee.
This is an interesting one and, perhaps, a good test of where you sit on the scale between D-Day and a fully developed Tuesday.
Ex-Mrs LFTT had a near fatal heart attack about 3 years ago and I was surprised how little I felt …. it confirmed to me that she really is “just someone I used to know a long time ago.”
LFTT
I agree this is a pretty solid Tuesday litmus test. I think if my former sibling in law called with this information, I would only play along enough to get a copy of the death certificate as I have a life insurance policy I own on klootzak to kick in and cover the lost child support and pension should he die early. I wouldn’t want my name in his obituary as his treatment of me shows he didn’t care for me to have a role in his life beyond being a f***able appliance. Was his Whirlpool refrigerator mentioned? I think my reaction would be the same as your if klootzak had a life threatening event – a shrug.
ROFLMAO.
Personally, I can’t wait for the karma bus to run over my ex FW narcopath! Occasionally I come across photos and feel wistful about the life path I thought we had together. Securely on the way to a prosperous early retirement and able to care for disabled child no expenses spared. A future FW destroyed and now kids have uncertain college funding while I am suddenly thrown into a work-until-FRA future. That’s when it turns to rage and wish for Karma!
Tracy’s story about her elderly friend’s wasted decades as an unpaid actor in FW’s Impression Management really hits home. To a narcissist everyone is merely a supporting actor pawn in their lifelong play “Faux Good Person” in which he/she must be the adored amazing STAR. It explains the ease with which children are discarded.
I hope she doesn’t go. She should not care what these other people think! This FW cheated on her and destroyed her life and now the onus is on her to be a decent person? WTF? No…just no!
I will not feel one bit sorry for either of my 2 EXFW’s when they die. Not one bit. That’s what happens when you betray your partner, they stop giving a shit, at some point! It may take some years to not care any more, but when it does, it is glorious!