Hours after I returned home with the so-called simple agreement forms for my divorce from Edgar, my doctor called. Turns out, there is a reason other than stress why I'm so tired — and it's not that I'm having one of those female heart attacks with the weird symptoms, as I had feared.

My hemoglobin is low. The doctor said he suspects I'm bleeding internally.

"This is not an emergency," he said. When I return next week from visiting my parents I'm to go see him for tests. Oh, okay.

And then I realized: Had this happened after I get my divorce, I probably wouldn't know there was a problem, much less be planning to check it out. When Ed is really gone, so is my health insurance.

Tired? Take more vitamins, get more rest and exercise. When my leg falls off or blood starts running from my ears, then I will afford, somehow, to see a doctor, in the emergency room, because it is an emergency.

Millions of people are doing it. It's the American way.

I've been delightfully spoiled for many years, insured and able to make co-payments so I can see a doctor whenever I think I need to. I am afraid of giving that up.

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."

I've heard versions of that quote, attributed to Ambrose Redmoon, for years. Especially since I came into AA, where we talk about feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Ed has been out of the house for a year. I've done a lot of life reconstruction since then, with much more to come, and some of it is already scaring me. But old Ambrose's words are wise.

Apprehensive as I am, I'm also unwilling to let concerns about health insurance stop me from ending this bad marriage.

Who knows? Maybe once the divorce is final, my relief will be so great I'll be struck perfectly healthy. 

Edgar's therapist mentioned that Edgar's relationship with alcohol was the most important, the one he was willing to sacrifice everything for. My husband, Ed, dismissed the notion with a "don't-be-ridiculous" air that I knew well.

Accustomed as I was to going along with him — and probably because it suited my vanity — I dismissed the notion, too.

After Ed and I had been apart for some months, I listened to a fellow alcoholic, who was under the influence of something at the time, insist that he did not love booze and drugs more than he loved his wife and kids.

And I finally accepted my truth: His therapist was dead right about Ed's affair with alcohol.

Ed would disagree and tell me that his uncontrollable drinking was hell. I don't doubt that. But, as I told him, "I'd feel differently if you were being chased down the street by bottles of rum that threw you to the pavement and poured themselves down your throat, but it doesn't work that way. At some point you make a choice to pick up a drink."

I'm reminded of that Lou Christie hit from the ‘60s, "Lightnin' Strikes," in which he sang falsetto about being powerless to resist sudden attractions to women. He promised his girlfriend that one day he'd settle down and they'd get married.

But until then, he wanted her to stick around, understand.

It is perhaps unimaginably hard for an alcoholic to stop drinking. I don't know exactly why I've been able to do it, one day at a time, for almost a year and a half and Ed has not.

Many recovering alcoholics (and we're always "recovering" or "recovered"; it's kind of like being a pickle, you never go back to being a cucumber) say, "There but for the grace of God go I."

Sometimes, it’s a good thing when the other shoe drops. It became clear early in my seven-year marriage to Edgar that he is an alcoholic. I might have noticed before the vows were said, had I not been so happy to have found the ultimate drinking buddy.

But after I stopped counting the number of times he went to detox and to rehab, after I stopped hiding his car keys and calling the cops when he found them, after I finally realized he wasn’t the only alcoholic in the house and sobered up, I noticed that I was not happily married.

I should have been. Ed is bright and funny and professionally accomplished.

He was far more likely to cook and clean than I was, and as far as I knew was faithful -- except for those lost weekends, and weeks, with the bottle.

But I did realized that I couldn't trust my husband, who had sworn that he never lied to me about anything important.

In addition, we had uncomfortably different ideas about money, and about the state of our marriage.

But Ed had put the plug in the jug, as recovering alcoholics say. So I tried to be satisfied.

I told him that if he went back to drinking he’d have to find someplace else to live.

Professionals had told him that if he resumed drinking he wouldn’t live very long.

I was glad he was accumulating sober time, though bizarrely, I knew that, if he started drinking again, my decision about the marriage would be much easier to make.

On the other hand, I couldn't wish active alcoholism on anybody, especially not the only guy I ever married.

Then I was gone for a week to visit my elderly parents.

Ed and I talked every day, and I looked forward to getting home. He knew when and where my flight was arriving, but wasn’t there to meet me.

And he didn’t answer his cell phone the first couple of times I called. When he did pick up the phone, he had trouble explaining what was going on.