Cheating Wife Has Incurable Cancer

Wow. I just tried to put myself in your painfully complicated shoes, Mick, and the sensation this brought was nearly unbearable. Your circumstances aren’t unheard of but I imagine they’re unusual enough that it immediately risks feeling isolated and alone due to the fact that few others around you will have gone through anything parallel. And that’s even aside from the fact that the situation sounds overwhelming. There are so many clashing enormous themes in what you’re describing. Honor, forgiveness, moral injury, trauma recovery, mercy, legacy, self identity, role modeling, etc.

It’s enough to drive anyone mad so all power to you for keeping your wits about you, not to mention being able to construct cohesive sentences in describing it. It’s the kind of thing that always makes me reflexively reach for some analogy or other in a desperate effort to wrap my mind around it.

For better or worse (tilting towards “worse” I’m afraid), the very first “analogy” your situation made me think of was an angry projection of how I think I’d feel in the same circumstances and one that’s not particularly sympathetic to your wife’s suffering: Aesop’s “Dog in the Manger” parable about a dog that’s so jealous of how much the horse loves oats that it decides to lay down and die in the oat barrel. As if she hadn’t done enough to you and your kids, now she’s extending the trauma in a different way, keeping centrality and, in particular, delaying your ability to move on from the trauma of betrayal by getting away from the instigator of it, rebuild your life, even find new love, etc.

But even if bits of truth emerge in harsh light, it’s not as if your wife “decided” to get sick to spite you and suspend your ability to disconnect and heal. And the angry analogy doesn’t acknowledge that the “dog” in this case is, in fact, a human being you once loved, the mother of children who still love her and, furthermore, for normal people, the specter of true suffering in any living creature– even ones we can’t bear the sight of– is traumatic and heartbreaking.

So I shook off this comparison and instead thought of the scene from the film version of Angels in America when the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg played by Meryl Streep finally relents from razzing and pricking the conscience of Roy Cohn, her executioner, as he slowly dies from AIDS. In a moment of mercy as his death approaches, she recites the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Then she ends it with “You son of a bitch.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJhhrFN9E2I

I know– hardly a less harsh analogy than the first. Obviously the scale of it isn’t a perfect match either. Even if cheaters often put the lives of chumps at risk through potential STD exposure or are sometimes so empathy-free and even sadistic in their emotional abuse that they almost seem to be intentionally driving victims to suicidal ideation, it’s not exactly the same as unjustly ordering someone’s death in the electric chair. But there are elements in all forms of betrayal that overlap if simply in terms of the shockingly ugly, chilling, soul-rattling display of of human cruelty and selfishness. Regardless of the scale, seeing this specter is hard to get over. It’s a traumatic reminder that human beings can be heartless and dangerous, makes us feel less safe in the world, etc.

Anyway, even if the film scene isn’t the best analogy, what it crystalized for me was that “mercy” may have nothing to do with forgiving an offense or offender. I thought the character of Rosenberg made this clear by capping off the prayer with “You son of a bitch.” In essence, the scene could be viewed as a standoff over the question of forgiveness and mercy.

I suppose it’s worth mentioning that not all major religions require forgiveness to achieve salvation or to be viewed as good or truly faithful. In traditional Judaism, it’s optional which makes the question of mercy appear to be separate. Is it possible to be merciful without forgiving? And is forgiveness always healthy from a psychological and justice perspective? Is it even possible that the typical perception of what constitutes forgiveness is a bit exaggerated or off and that mercy should really cover it– simply having enough empathy to recognize when a living creature is suffering and not to revel in that suffering, even attempt to remedy it? Could it be that traditional prescriptions for forgiveness were really meant as a correction for those who lack basic empathy?

I think those are largely unanswerable questions though perhaps the film comes down on the side of mercy being possible without what most people believe is forgiveness. Imagining I was Rosenberg (another huge mental stretch since the closest I’ve come to being electrocuted was touching an ungrounded carnival trailer in the rain), I suspect I wouldn’t be able to forgive what Cohn did simply because I wouldn’t wish the same on anyone else if that makes sense.

I can only relate to this according to things I’ve personally been through like being the victim of violent crime or getting horribly chumped in the past. I can’t forgive those things– at least not according to the common interpretation of forgiveness (turning the other cheek, loving my enemy)– precisely because I couldn’t bear the idea of my children or really any innocent person being subjected to them. That in turn reminds me of a line from a poem by Yevtushenko: “The young will not forgive in us what we forgave” which, at least in a political context, I think was meant to say “Don’t minimize the effects of evil and don’t stop hating it if this makes you stand down and fail to prevent the same from happening to the next generation.”

So, again, imagining if I were Rosenberg, I would feel a sort of activist or moral duty to keep just enough of that sense of outrage alive so I’d never drift into minimizing or whitewashing the seriousness of the offense because, in doing so, I might fail to sufficiently empathize and support someone else in the same boat or might not be motivated enough to protect them in the first place if I had the power to do this. So my sense of what the character did was to suspend her very important moral ire over real injustice long enough to let the offender pass out of this world without adding to their already great suffering.

I can’t think of a more enormous moral conflict. At risk of oversimplifying, here are two irreconcilable things, neither of which can be sacrificed for the other. On the one hand we can never lose sight of the fact that really, really bad things are really, really bad because, in a sense, this risks allowing it to happen to others. On the other hand, part of maintaining that moral sense requires not becoming corrupted by practicing cruelty… which can also lead to being so hardened and numb that we stand passively by and allow terrible things to happen to others or fail to show empathy.

Aside from concerns about becoming permanently hardened by practicing cruelty, I think that, if I was in any kind of related real life circumstance, temporarily suspending moral outrage by showing mercy would be partly a matter of future “emotional planning.” Being honorable as you put it and showing mercy to a harmful person could at least allay the risk of later being haunted by regrets and losing my self-identity as “not cruel.” If I imagined that my children still loved the suffering individual, I wouldn’t want to add to my kids’ existential crises by betraying any callousness.

In the end I can’t fully put myself in your shoes and I’m worried my awkward efforts to do so won’t even be helpful. That would feel especially regrettable because I think you’ve done us all a brave service by sharing your experience. At the very least, it forces us all to think about it, almost like preemptive processing just in case any of us ever end up in the same kind of impossible bind. Like sharing tips on how not to drown in a rip tide, it’s a great turn to others since there’s nothing more difficult than having to figure this out for the very first time while in the heat of crisis. So thank you. And again, I really hope that some of the responses you get might buff a few jagged edges off what you and your kids are going through.