The New York Times exposes the emotional side of dividing up the personal property in a divorce.
Jesse Kornbluth writes (excerpt):
We left it to lawyers to work out the financial part of the divorce. All we had to do — and our lawyers were clear we had to do this ourselves — was divide our marital property.
Easier said than done.
The common wisdom at moments like this is “get on with your life.” By which people mean: “Leave everything to your wife. Start fresh.”
On a practical level, I could not do this because I’d been writing about décor and design long enough to know that replacing my share of our furniture, art and tchotchkes would cost a great deal more than it had in 1986. Back then, I had flown to London, where my wife was then living, with $3,000 in cash. In three days, it bought a venerable mahogany breakfront, a Biedermeier table and armchair, a painted screen faded dark as a Rembrandt, a folding card table so well used the green felt was ripped and a bunch of antique table lamps. Once we were settled in New York, we acquired a couch, silver side tables with mirrored mercury-silver tops, a George Smith coffee table and a wonderfully worn Oriental rug. Add a Duane Michals photo and some English watercolors, and we were talking about a significant collection of stuff.
It was, however, the sentimental value that mattered more. The end of any marriage is painful, and I spent my share of evenings playing Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen dirges. But most of my memories of our marriage were sunny. For me, those 12 years were about a big love story, the writing of seven books by my wife and three books and innumerable magazine articles by me, and, most of all, the creation — with the enlightened cooperation of the children’s father — of a functional blended family that shared summer houses and spent holidays together.
I do not believe there’s such a thing as closure. I think one’s history is a life companion. My wife and I might be getting divorced, but I was not divorcing the children. As much as possible, I wanted to march into the future with them or, because they were both away at school when their mother and I separated, with the things that they had used and cherished.