When her 43-year-old husband collapsed and died of an embolism, Julie Metz was devastated. It was so sudden, so unfair, so
wrong. They'd been together 16 years and had a 6-year-old daughter.
Seven months after his death, Metz learned that he'd been having affairs.
With one of her friends. And a bicoastal array of strangers. For years.
The proof was in hundreds of emails stored on his computer: "The sex you and I have together is spine-tingling and bone-jarring," Henry had written to Metz's athletic friend Cathy. "And if I have anything to do with it, it will only get better."
What could be worse than the death of a relative or close friend? Perhaps it's learning, as Julie Metz did, that this lost loved one harbored a shocking secret, even lived a double life. And perhaps the only thing worse than being betrayed is being betrayed by someone who can no longer even attempt to make amends. Taken separately, death and betrayal are hard in every sense of the word: Hard to endure. Hard to accept. Hard to understand. But intertwined, they present a complex kind of misery and challenges all their own: Is it possible to punish, forgive, or even come to terms with someone who will never hear you ask: Why did you do this to me? What else don't I know?
Shamefully Surprised
Carole Brody Fleet, author of Widows Wear Stilettos: A Practical and Emotional Guide for the Young Widow, speaks to groups of widows around the country. She's been approached by hundreds of people who have experienced the blow of posthumous revelations. Case in point: a woman whose husband had taken out a second mortgage on their home and amassed over a quarter-million dollars in credit card debt.
People who discover a posthumous shock often engage in self-flagellation, Fleet says, usually in the form of "I am so stupid/dumb/blind. How could I have not known about this?" and "What will happen if/when people find out?" Poring over Henry's passionate missives to other women, "I thought, I did not know this man," Julie Metz says. "I saw only the part of him that he had been willing to show me. I came to realize that our life together was quite limited."
Am I Still "Me"?
"When you discover that your partner has been unfaithful, you experience a PTSD-type response that is not simply a loss of trust but a basic loss of self—a disintegration, a shattering," says Janis Abrahms Spring, a Connecticut clinical psychologist and author of books including How Can I Forgive You? The Courage to Forgive, the Freedom Not To. "You may have always known yourself as attractive, desirable, competent, funny, and resourceful. When you find out that your partner has had an affair, you lose all of that positive sense and you can't easily recapture it."
One also experiences a loss of a sense of specialness: "You thought you mattered to someone like no one else and now you've discovered that you are replaceable and interchangeable." Then comes a profound loss of faith—in God, in karma, in justice.
And then, while weathering the emotional storm brought on by betrayal, the recipient of a posthumous secret rides the waves of grief: sadness, intense fear about the future, occasional relief, and regret.
Discussing her double trauma now, Julie Metz displays an equanimity that was long in coming and hard-won. Seven summers ago, as detailed in Metz's memoir Perfection, every day brought new layers of rage, shame, and pain.
"People don't always want to admit when they're in a furious rage," Metz muses now. "It doesn't seem like a very honorable emotion."
Yet for many facing postmortem revelations, fury comes first. Fleet calls it "anger at the deceased for the egregious breach of trust, at the inability to confront the deceased, and at themselves for grieving the death of someone who 'doesn't deserve' that kind of emotional investment." It's the primal response to a primal indignity: You lied to me. You tricked me. Charlene Martel felt that deep-down ire while learning at age 16 that the man she'd grown up believing was her father was not.
Martel's mother died unexpectedly in 1989. Two months later, a family friend revealed that Martel's biological father was her mother's long-gone boyfriend; the violent man whom Martel had always called "Dad" was not her blood kin. Her siblings were actually half-siblings.
"I felt that I had lost everything. My family was not exactly my family anymore. My entire family, such as it was, had lied to me my entire life"—especially Martel's mother, "who had always raised me to tell the truth at all costs."
"I honestly thought [it] was some cruel joke-though, realistically, it made sense of a few things, such as why I was never shown my full birth certificate." It also explained the huge age gap between Martel and her closest sister. She had once asked her mother about this gap: "She explained that she had had two boys between us who had died. Now I can't help but wonder if that was just another fabrication to hold together the elaborate deception."
Legally Bitter
Mark Sichel and his father weren't close. In fact, they'd been estranged for many years when Sichel, a New York City psychotherapist and the author of Healing Family Rifts, learned that his father was dying of leukemia.
