I'm glad Edgar and I are getting along so well since the divorce, but I'm also a little worried about it. He was in the room when the judge declared our marriage irretrievably broken. But he's still acting like it's not.

A business call came to the house for him, so I called to pass on the message. We talked, which is how the whole thing with us got started and is something I still enjoy. I thought he sounded like he'd been drinking. But I didn't find it necessary to mention that, until he began telling me how much he misses me.

"Are you drinking?" I asked.

"No," he replied.

"There have been times," I said, "when you'd tell me you hadn't when you had. And that was part of the problem."

He had nothing to say to that.

I actually have nothing to say about that. When I divorced Ed, I also divorced his alcoholism. But it's not like I don't care. It still hurts to know he's in pain and I still can't fix it.

Addiction is cruel that way.

I didn't cause it, I can't control it, and I can't cure it. All I can do, now that I've gotten myself to a safe space, is wish Ed well and be careful not to enable him any more.

While I'm often sad to be moving away from my home of the last 20 years, it's probably a positive thing. Putting even more space between me and the ex should be good for us both. 

Good Lord, how long does this last? The deadline I gave my husband to move out was a year ago today. Last night, hours after receiving the latest update on the progress of our do-it-yourself divorce, he asked, once again, if I was still set on it.

Arrgggh.

What has happened, what has he done in the past year, that would incline me to want to reconcile, I wondered indignantly. My roommate pointed out that a year is a long time to stay married to someone you don't want to be married to any more. 

Oh. Well.

There are a number of reasons for that, most of them coming down to money. But since our electronic exchange last night, I've been so sad — for Ed, for myself, over our failed marriage.

And I've had to hash it out again — go once more through the reasons why I want this divorce. My husband, who thank God is sober now, has had sober spells before. Each was followed by a drinking bout that was worse than the one preceding it.

So 14 months ago, I decided I'd had enough. I had warned him months before. But he got drunk and stayed drunk and he had to go.

We had a couple of other issues, too...struggles over money and honesty and communication. So it's not like there's any need for doubt about whether to end this marriage.

Still...how long is this going to go on? When — if ever — will I finally accept my decision to divorce Ed?

That's like asking, How do you mend a broken heart?

Maybe it's too soon to tell ... and I hope I'm not jinxing things by mentioning it here ... but perhaps Edgar, my soon to be ex, and I can have a polite relationship.

We've included each other on the list of recipients for the political stories and jokes we've been emailing like crazy of late. My updates on efforts to move our divorce forward — by the way, have you noticed that you cannot get through to self help in family court by phone, because they don't answer the phone, so you have to go down there? — have not drawn the nasty responses I would've expected.

"I'd like to be friends with Ed one day," I said to my therapist, the Good Doctor. She fixed me with a dubious look. "I may not live that long, of course," I acknowledged.

My roommate, who has followed this divorce drama for about a year now, saw a friendly sort of email from my estranged husband the other day and suggested, "Maybe somebody has taken him aside and told him, ‘It's going to be okay.'"

I hope so.

One of my students mentioned that she and her ex-husband have a great relationship now; they're like best friends. When she said that I couldn't imagine it, but now I dare to hope for something similar.

I mean, Ed is still the only guy I ever married; I must have seen something in him, though I've spent the last many months concentrating on the irretrievable breakdown of our marriage.

Part of me still thinks that hoping for a good relationship with my soon-to-be-ex-husband is like believing in the Easter Bunny. But the rest of me believes it's okay to want that — as long as I don't hold my breath. 

A revelation. It has finally dawned on me that I don't have to hate my husband to divorce him.

Having spent most of the last year putting up barriers against Edgar to defend myself mentally, physically and emotionally, I guess there's a reason the realization has been so long in coming.

In an email the other day, Ed told me that he misses me terribly.

My first thought was to run and hide under the bed for a week or so, partly because I miss him, too.

Sort of. Every now and then.

But the parts of him and our life together that I get a little wistful about come with the not-so-nice stuff, which is included at no extra charge.

I know that one reason — not the only one, but one reason I drank as long and as hard as I did — was to dull the pain and insanity-inducing frustration of living with an active alcoholic.

I don't want to go back to drinking, and I'm pretty sure that would happen if Ed and I got back together.

Since we've been apart, he's had some periods when he didn't drink. But over the past 11 months I've been blessed to miss some of the scary episodes involving him and the bottle, and he's not volunteering any reports on how well he's handling his alcoholism.

Here's the crux of it: He knows the disease of alcoholism is costing him his marriage.

So better safe than sorry.

I wrote Ed that while I sometimes miss him, too, I do not want to get back on that merry-go-round with him.

I added that this does not mean I don't care for or about him and pointed out that while he may not have been the best husband, I may not have been the best wife.

Somewhere in my house is a book entitled Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be by Lama Surya Das. I bought it three years ago when I lost my job and my last pregnancy within a few weeks of each other.

When the job went, that was kind of okay. I was about to take up a new vocation: motherhood. When the baby went, that was utterly not okay, and I've been trying ever since, in ways healthy and not so, to get over it.

I need to reread that book. Fifty-one weeks ago I was surprised to hear myself telling Edgar yes, I do want a divorce. I still haven't filed the papers.

I can talk about keeping the health insurance and the expense and trouble of divorce, but at least some of my delay is a result of my unwillingness to let go of a bad marriage.

Doggone it, took me 40 years to find a husband. So he wasn't the best husband, but he was — uh, still is — my husband.

It also took me quite a while to find and buy my house, which I don't really seem to be able to afford right now. 

In truth, I haven't been able to afford it for quite a while.

It has been pointed out to me that if I don't figure out how to pay for, or to sell, or to rent out the house, it'll be taken from me. Then I'll have to let go. For the past several months I've been working on letting go of the conviction that I must and can hold on to my home.

I've put less effort into the idea of releasing Ed.

But I feel my tightly clenched hands being pried open, so to speak. I'm beginning to accept the possibility that it's time to let someone else (who can afford it) love this house.

Maybe the practice will help me to let go of my marriage.

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."

"Marriage makes you soft," I once told my female co-workers. This was a few years ago, during a very active hurricane season here in Florida.

My husband, Ed, was spending time in rehab, so it was up to me to get the house ready for an approaching storm. I was not handling the task very well.

I'd been doing okay working full-time at a new job, taking care of our many pets and, when I was permitted, driving 15 miles through traffic to visit Ed. But I quickly wore myself out hauling in the lawn furniture, the plants, the grill and all the other stuff we kept outside.

In a hurricane, that stuff becomes projectiles.

And then there was that little matter of the steel storm panels, the ones that are supposed to be secured across the sliding glass door. I'd donned high-top sneakers and leather work gloves to give it the old college try, but by the time I'd hauled 3 of the 12 heavy panels from storage, I was exhausted.

Surprised and frustrated to find that I really couldn't do it all, all by myself, I burst into bitter tears.

Surely I had not been such a wuss before I became a wife.

Wuss or no, I still had to secure the house.

The next morning, as insistent breezes announced the proximity of the storm, I was back at it, determinedly ferrying the storm panels to the front of the house. Two of my neighbors, Bob and Joe, were outside, so I stopped for a few minutes to chat. As I prepared to get back to work, Bob asked, "Do you need some help?"

Do I what?

I almost said no. I'd always thought of myself as independent and completely capable. But common sense prevailed.

Bob and I got the panels up in a matter of minutes, during which I realized it is a two-person job. Duh.

When we finished, I barely managed to keep from crying as I thanked him profusely.

"It's nothing," he said. "That's what neighbors do."

Maybe this is the real reason I still haven’t filed for divorce: I just don’t feel like it. It’s probably that lazy gene Jill Brooke wrote about.

For a while there I thought, feared, that Ed’s absence was making my heart grow fonder. But as I listened to myself explaining my delay to my (happily married) friend Melody, I thought: What am I, crazy?

OK, the Ed who never minded interrupting road trips to stop at outlet stores, the one who cooked dinner, the one who rescued animals in distress, he was great. And I guess I can admit missing him.

Unfortunately, he shares a body with that other damned Edgar.

The one who spent the mortgage money on a boat.

The one who didn’t quite understand the difference between a wife and a secretary.

The passed-out-on-the-floor-drunk one I rousted to go with me to the hospital when I thought I was having a heart attack. (Big mistake: I should have gone alone.)

These past few months, my estranged husband really hasn’t been any trouble. And I’d like to keep it that way. I expect, though, that filing those divorce papers will change that.

While whining to myself about how I don’t wanna do it, I had a great idea.

There should be a sunset provision for marriages.

Nolo.com defines a sunset law as one “that automatically terminates the agency or program it establishes unless it is expressly renewed.”

I propose that marriages sink below the horizon after seven years, unless the parties take action to continue them.

I mean, you have to renew your driver’s license every now and then -- less often than you must register your car or dog.

The last time I saw my therapist, the Good Doctor, she suggested I was procrastinating about filing for divorce from Ed. A week later I’m not a millimeter closer to being the unmarried woman I’ve acted like these last 10 months.

So maybe she’s right.

But why would I drag my feet?

There is the health insurance. That’s no small thing for a person of modest means with several pre-existing conditions, all well controlled thanks to … Ed’s health insurance.

And it’s in my nature to procrastinate. That is, as we alcoholics call them, one of my character defects.

There is another character defect common to alcoholics and other addicts: people pleasing.

Those of us afflicted with this one want everyone to be happy. If there’s going to be a problem, we certainly don’t want to be the ones causing it. And my husband does not want to get divorced.

Back in the fall of 2000 I stood up in front of the judge and our families and our friends and God and everybody and said that it was me and this guy, now and forever more.

I was mistaken.

Intellectually I’ve understood and acted on that, but emotionally maybe I’m still not quite there.

I married a boy startlingly like the boy who married dear old mom, though my husband is an alcoholic and my father is not. Dear old mom is still married to dear old dad, 59 often-uncomfortable years later. This is not what I want.

Indeed, it’s not what she wants for me.

The Good Doctor assures me that it’s OK to fail; that’s something human beings do.

Of course I wish my marriage hadn’t failed. But it did.

I’m going to spend a few days with my folks. Perhaps seeing them in action will inspire me to get it in gear and set not only Ed but myself free.

It’s been a year now since I determined I could not go on living with my husband, Ed. While he was the first one to bring up the D-word, he is also the one who does not want to get divorced.

Once I finally got him out of the house (my house, thank you very much; I bought it a few years before we married), I devoted myself to scrambling for money to keep body, soul, and animal family together.

I soon realized that divorce, with its lawyers and fees, was a luxury. And Ed, never a financial genius, said he didn’t have the funds either.

He did email me a proposed settlement agreement; I think he found a template on the Internet.

We have no kids and my lawyer tells me our pets are considered chattel (I’m sorry; anybody who looks to me for food and shelter and doesn’t work is a dependent).

I wasn’t seeking alimony and he wasn’t planning to battle over the house. Still, like any good divorcing couple, we managed to oppose each other.

I wanted to keep the health insurance he got through work, at least for a while; he would not sign a quitclaim deed formally relinquishing any interest in the house, until the divorce was final.

I was more concerned about the health insurance. I could keep that by just keeping quiet, so I did.

But after I tapped my retirement account to cover all the things I hadn’t earned earning enough to handle, I remembered that I’d also meant to get divorced.

I got out of bed in the middle of the night and emailed Ed, asking how he thought we should go forward.

Then it was his turn to keep quiet.

Weeks passed without a word from him.

I felt I’d done my part for the present, but my therapist thought I was procrastinating.

Imagine.

I said I’d get in touch with Ed, ask what he wanted to do. “Why are you giving this back to him?!” she demanded.

I thought about it briefly before replying.

“Habit.”