I'm Not Dead Yet 
by Kevin Brown



A few months after I turned twenty-seven, I was talking to one of my co-workers.  After I listed what I had already experienced that year, she shook her head and said, “You should be dead by now.”   Somehow our discussion turned toward the stress test that is often reprinted, where people are given a certain number of points for events in their lives to see how much stress they have been under (It’s called the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale (after Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe, two psychiatrists), and each Life Change Unit has a different “weight” given to it).  I might not have been dead, but I thought I could do fairly well on that test (and I was one of those weird children who liked taking tests; I’ve turned into a weird adult that still does).

Divorce: 73 points; Running Total: 73 points

My divorce was final in the same month I turned twenty-seven.  I should be clear that, as divorces go, mine was one of the least painful.  We didn’t have any kids, and it had been clear for over a year that the relationship was going to end.  We were only together four and a half years, though that was four years too long.  I had tried to end the marriage after six months, but I listened to both my parents and her parents and gave it another chance.

It’s not that she was an awful person in any way; it was more about my failings, actually.  I was a young twenty-two when we were married, and I had no idea who I was or who I hoped to become yet.  I knew I was going to graduate school and that I hoped to teach, but that was all I knew at that point.  She was four years older, had held a steady job for all of the four years she had been out of college, and she clearly knew who she was.  We had almost nothing in common, especially as I began graduate school and moved more toward academic and intellectual pursuits (some of which were affectations, not surprisingly, given graduate studies in English), which did not interest her.

Unfortunately, because I did not have the courage to end the relationship after six months, I tried to end it through passive-aggressive means, simply refusing to truly engage in the relationship.  I was at least honest enough with her to let her know that things were not really going to change in our marriage, but I never ended matters in a decisive fashion, which would have been the adult thing to do.  She ended up bringing up divorce as an option when she had a chance to move back to Northeast Tennessee, where we had been living, and work for the person she had worked for before.  She even went and met with the lawyer to take care of the official paperwork.

Change in Living Conditions: 25 points; Running Total: 98 points

The divorce precipitated a number of changes in living conditions.  Obviously, my soon-to-be-ex-wife moved away, and I was left living alone. I allowed her to take most of the furniture, and I was planning on giving away the rest when I moved out, as I wanted a clean start after the divorce (and the furniture was fairly old, anyway).  I had also been relying on her salary, as she worked full-time when I was attending graduate school (I had an assistantship through the library that paid my tuition and gave me a small stipend, and I also taught part-time at a community college and state university, though both were ending, just as my marriage did).  Throughout that summer, then, I lived on credit cards, both through charging what I could and through taking out cash advances to pay the rent, decisions I would regret for years to come.

I also moved to a different state about a month after she left; however, the move was not a simple one.  I was moving from Mississippi to Indiana to take a new job, but I could not move in until the middle of July.  I was leaving Mississippi in May, so I had to move the few things I had kept to a storage facility in Indiana, then live with my parents in Tennessee for the intervening time.  My parents were fine with my doing so, and they treated me like an adult, but the lack of independence still grated on me, especially because I had also started a new relationship.

Marital Reconciliation: 45 points; Running Total: 143 points

I might be a bit dramatic here, as I did not reconcile with my wife.  Instead, I started dating my childhood sweetheart (CS from here on out) before my divorce was official.  I had not really planned on doing so, but I am the one who initiated matters.  I had seen her a year before on a visit to my hometown (where she still lived) when I went to visit a former professor at the college I attended (and where she was now a student).  On the pretext of getting her brother’s email address, I went by her house the next day, and we talked for an hour or so.  It was clear we still got along quite well, and my marriage was only a year away from the end (a fact I tried to communicate, but which she did not pick up on at all), so she was certainly on my mind.  Thus, when the divorce process began and I was in my hometown on a visit, I went by her house to see her.  She was not in, so I ended up telling her parents about the divorce, which was not the way I had hoped to break the news to her.

The next day, I went back, and we started talking about our lives.  She said that her mother had told her about the divorce.  I admitted that I wasn’t sorry, that it was a good thing, but that everyone else seemed sorry to hear it.  She blushed a bit and said that she wasn’t sorry.  It was fairly clear at that point that we would get back together, so I asked her out to dinner to celebrate her coming graduation from college (which I attended).

By this point, she and I had known each other for over a decade, and we had spent part of the six years I knew her in high school and college dating, though we were always off and on, mainly due to my inability to stay in any relationship more than a few months.  We had not seen each other while I was in graduate school (until that chance meeting), but I kept up with her life through her brother, whom I had shared a dorm room with during my junior year of college.  When we began dating again, it felt like a reconciliation, and we were both clearly thinking that this time would be the time that would lead to marriage.  When she said that she definitely wanted children, I put aside the part of me that did not (another thing my ex-wife and I did not have in common, though I was clear about my feelings with her before we ever married) and believed things would work out.

Change to a Different Line of Work: 36 points; Running Total: 179 points

What complicated our relationship was that I had accepted my first full-time teaching job in Indiana, and she was living in Tennessee, where she had a job that paid the bills, but was not connected to her college major (French) at all.  She was born and raised in the same house all of her life, so the idea of her moving away was not realistic at that point.  I was looking forward to my job, though this was the first time I had ever moved on my own.  I lived in same town from the time I was two until I was twenty-four, and my then-wife had moved with me to Mississippi (obviously).  I liked the other new faculty, though, and I enjoyed teaching.

I was teaching at a private high school, an age group I had never really taught (one summer, I worked with high school students through Upward Bound, a program designed for students who will be the first in their family to attend college), but they were motivated students who often attended (or at least applied to) Ivy League colleges.  I taught the classes largely as I had taught college classes before, and the students responded well enough (I now know that I could have taught those classes so much better than I did, a feeling most teachers share).  These students were strong high school students, and discipline problems were largely handled by people higher up than me.  It was a great job for a rookie teacher, though I didn’t know that at the time.

I had only been there a few weeks when I realized that the relationship with CS was never going to work as long as she was eight hours away.  We talked on the phone, but there was no way we could see each other regularly as long as we had that distance between us.  I was going to be helping with the basketball team, so it was not possible for me to get away on the weekends for visits, and her job (and finances) prevented her from doing so.  One night, during a rather heated phone conversation, I mentioned that I didn’t believe things would work as long as she was in Tennessee.  She hung up, and I thought that might be the end of the relationship, but she called back within the hour and said that she wanted to move to Indiana.  Because I lived in a house that was owned by the school, she wasn’t able to live with me, so I had to help her find a place to live and work, while teaching full-time for the first time and adjusting to a new place myself.

Divorce: 50 points; Running Total: 229 points

We weren’t married, so we didn’t get divorced, but the ending of that relationship certainly felt like it.  We didn’t make it more than a few months before the end came.  We fought almost once a week after her move, even leading to my hanging up on her during a conversation about money (I had never hung up on anyone, nor have I since).  We could have worked things out, and we could have probably gotten married (except for the issue of kids, which probably would have ended things for a good reason), but I was still too immature and too emotionally unstable at that point.  I was a few months recovered from the divorce, and, while that event didn’t really affect me, the years before did.

Because of the passive-aggressive approach I took, I had largely shut down emotionally, withholding myself from my then-wife and everyone else.  Once I started using those emotions again, they had a tendency to get out of control.  Once, when I was living in our hometown, I was driving down the interstate when I began beating the passenger seat for no particular reason.  I just had a wave of emotions (partly anger, but partly just feeling again) that I needed to deal with, and that seemed to be the best way at the time.

Given mine and CS’s on-again/off-again past, she thought we might get back together again, but I never considered it.  I knew this time was final, and we both needed to move on.  She did, actually, as she was engaged within seven months of our breakup, a relationship that did not go well for her, though she did end up with a daughter.  My situation was both more and less complicated.

Beginning a Dating (sort of) Relationship: 0 points (!); Running Total: 229 points

I can’t pretend that my relationship with M is anywhere near marriage levels, but it seems the stress test should give me something for all of the complications this relationship brought to my life.  M and I never officially dated, as she was unwilling to commit even at that level, but we often went out together, and anyone else would have said we were dating, though she and I would not (in explaining the situation to people later, I would contend we did date, mainly on the basis of the last couple of weeks when M began trying to move the relationship in a more physical direction before the end of the semester; there were clear commitment issues there that I didn’t recognize at the time).  We would have what we felt were meaningful conversations, then avoid each other for the next week (we worked in the same department, which made matters even more complex), then reconcile through some other extended conversation.  This back-and-forth went on for the seven months of the school year after the relationship with CS ended, then she left and I left.

Change in Living Conditions: 25 points; Running Total: 254 points

I had decided by October that I didn’t want to teach any longer.  I enjoyed the classroom, certainly, but I didn’t like everything else that went with it, from the grading and preparation to the meetings before and after school.  I wanted to have time to read what I wanted, not what I needed to in order to teach.  What I really wanted, I now know, was to live like I did in graduate school, without any real responsibility, so it’s no surprise that I went back to graduate school, though this time I was pursuing library science.  I had enjoyed the work I did in the library when I was working on my English degree, and I knew that that job ended when librarians went home for the day, unlike teaching, which does not.  Telling M on the first date that I was leaving at the end of that year probably did not help my chances with that relationship, though she was only there for one year, as she was an intern (similar to a student teacher, though she had graduated from college) at the school, not a full-time teacher.

Begin or End School/College: 26 points; Running Total: 280 points

I moved from Indiana to Alabama immediately after the high school graduation, as I was taking summer classes in order to complete the program in a year.  I started classes six weeks before my twenty-eighth birthday, and I did enjoy them.  More than anything, though, I enjoyed the free time to read and write as much as I wanted.  I went to classes in a research library that had almost every book I could want, and I made ample use of the collection.  I stayed up late, spent time with new friends, and enjoyed life.  If this was stress, I could take as much as life could give me.

Change in Financial State: 38 points; Running Total: 318 points

Of course, returning to graduate school meant the end of a full-time salary.  My ex-wife even called me (our only communication post-divorce) to see when I was planning to pay off a credit card that was in both of our names (and which I had taken as part of the divorce, as the charges on it were mainly mine), as she was planning to buy a house and was concerned about her debt load.  She did not know I was in graduate school (again), and she wasn’t happy the card would not be paid off soon, but she accepted it, as there was nothing she could do.

One would think my quality of life would change with the return to graduate school, but student loans prevented that from happening.  I lived in a duplex that was as nice as the house I had lived in in Indiana (though it was not as spacious, certainly), and I ate out much more often.  The credit card debt I had accrued during the previous summer had not diminished by much, and I doubled my student loan debt by returning to school.  But those were things I would not worry about when I was twenty-seven.  They would come due much later.

Overall Total: 318 points; Results and Conclusions

Holmes and Rahe calculated that a score of more than 300 would lead to a person’s having a higher chance of becoming ill.  Their test is not really a measurement of stress; it is more a measurement of how likely someone is of getting sick.  Since stress is one factor that leads to illness, they hoped to see if major life changes impacted one’s chances of illness.  According to their chart, I had a “high or very high risk of becoming ill in the near future.”  And I did get sick within my first two months of teaching in Indiana.  I remember walking along the sidewalk beside the lake that bordered our campus with the wind blowing and the misty rain making me feel even worse as I headed toward the health clinic on campus.  They prescribed Amoxicillin, which my students said was the default drug from the clinic, as they joked that it would be given to someone who walked in with a broken arm.

I did get sick, then, but I didn’t die, as my co-worker had joked.  In fact, it was my first year as an adult (graduate school has a way of keeping people from becoming one) and, though I did not handle it well in many cases, I began to see who I wanted to be.  I ultimately came back to teaching, and I have realized it is my main purpose.  I began to take writing more seriously than I ever had (including a failed novel), leading to my first creative publications the next year.  Ultimately, the stress test tells me nothing more than that I went through what most young people go through (maybe in a more condensed time frame, but perhaps not) in order to become who they need to be.  It is such events that help us to grow up, to become the people we need to be.