“Divorcing a spouse in a coma is legally possible but procedurally unusual. You’d need a guardian ad litem appointed to represent his interests, since he isn’t able to represent his own.”
— the attorney, on the phone
A process that felt, to me, almost grotesquely formal for a situation that had nothing formal about it at all — just a woman sitting beside an unconscious man trying to decide what she owed a marriage that might already have quietly ended months before his fall, without her ever being told.
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I didn’t file immediately, choosing instead to wait — partly because the doctors remained genuinely uncertain whether Carl would regain consciousness at all, and I didn’t want to make an irreversible decision about a man who might not survive long enough for it to matter in any practical sense. Partly because some part of me still needed to understand more before I could act on what I knew.
I found Pilar’s number eventually, through details in the letter itself, and made a call I spent days working up the nerve to make. In a conversation that was almost unbearably calm given the circumstances, I learned that Pilar had in fact ended things with Carl nearly three months earlier, before the fall — telling him plainly that she wasn’t willing to keep waiting for him to actually leave his marriage.
The letter I’d found had apparently been written in the weeks after that ending — an attempt to say something to Pilar he’d never worked up the courage to send before she’d already moved on without him.
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Carl woke up six weeks after his fall, his memory and cognition slowly returning over the following months in a recovery that surprised his doctors with how complete it eventually became. By then, I had spent those six weeks deciding with increasing clarity exactly what I intended to do regardless of what state he woke up in.
Once he was lucid enough to actually understand what I was saying, I told him that I had read the letter. That I knew about Pilar. That I was filing for divorce.
