We were visiting my ex-husband’s grandmother, Ruth, in Florida. Long before he was my ex. Infact, this particular visit was even before our wedding took place.
Everything Ruth did was loud. She laughed, she swore, she dressed louder than anyone else I’d ever met. She wanted to be noticed. She filled her home with art from around the world and filled her lives with characters as colorful as she.
She took me once to a friend’s, a sculptor’s, place. This woman’s apartment was filled to the brim with granite and marble works of varying sizes and shapes. Some geometrical, shiny, black; some white, curvaceous. Ruth put me on the spot and said, “Which do you like best?”
I didn’t know. None really was to my taste, but the artist herself was standing right there, beaming with curiosity. So I pointed at one, nearly a figure eight, made out of a taupe marble. It stood about thirty inches high and must have weighed about forty pounds. The plaque on the bottom read, “Sisyphus.” Despite my four-year, private liberal arts education, I had no idea what that meant. I should have looked it up.
A month or so later, Ruth’s grandson and I were married. (Ruth herself nearly boycotted the wedding, but that’s another story). Soon, her wedding gift to us arrived via UPS: the statue. I sat the piece just inside the front door. No pillar to raise it up for notice, just sat it there. For the next 26 years it remained.
Through the years of our marriage, all the years of arguing: which way the toilet paper should roll off the holder, what financial categories the $212.59 spent at Target was broken down into, whether the dishes should be washed before they were put into the dishwasher, that statue stood just inside the doorway to our home. Me, completely ignorant to its significance, its symbolism.
Sisyphus was a king of Corinth, a son of Aeolus. His name actually meant “crafty” in Greek: he was noted for his deception and he’s the equivalent in Greek folklore of the master trickster who turns up in many folk beliefs, such as Coyote in American Indian mythology. He even managed to cheat Death the first time around, surviving the experience to live to a ripe old age.
In Greek legend Sisyphus was punished in Hades for his misdeeds in life by being condemned eternally to roll a heavy stone up a hill. As he neared the top, the stone rolled down again, so that his labour was everlasting and futile.
In my ex’s eyes, I could never be ready on time, cook eggs properly, put away laundry fast enough, be a consistent disciplinarian to our children, our dog. Our marriage was a perpetual playing out of that ancient Greek mythology, me, rolling the same God-damned rock up a hill only to have it come rolling right back down again. Again, and again, and again.
Now divorced, I no longer push that stone. I am free of that insanity-producing Sisyphean life. Perhaps, like old Sys, I have cheated Death and am, instead, living, free of futility.
mindful musings 