2005年NPR美国国家公共电台八月-Breaking Up on a Friday in Washington

Fridays are divorce days in Bellingham, Washington. If you want to dissolve your marriage in Bellingham, you have to show up in court on a Friday, with all of the other couples who are divorcing that week. Recently one of those couples was commentator 1 Ron Judd and his ex-wife Jackie.

In the Whatcom County Courthouse names are called, couples rise from a wood bench and stand before a Judge. Swearing to tell the whole truth, one partner reads from a script--it's a standard form with blanks filled in at home. That sheet of paper in my hand was all that was left of my marriage, the birth, life and death of a promise reduced to a single page double-spaced.

My name is Ronald Charles Judd. I am the husband of Jack 2 Won. We were married on May 18th, 2002 in Bellingham, Washington. My wife is not pregnant. No children have been born to us. Our marriage is irretrievably broken. Irretrievably broken! My wife and I come to our hometown courtroom to untie 3 the knot. Each of us has sworn before friends and family we'd stay bound forever. I have a dozen other people that shuffled 4 up to the judge before us. Most of them walked away in tears. When our turn came, I tried not to look at Jackie, standing 5 at my shoulder for the first time in a long time. I tried not to remember that spring day five years ago when I knew, instantly and without doubt that I loved her .We were in the Rocky Mountains. She'd touched the nose of a wild deer and burst straight into tears. Not all counties require divorcers to appear in this very public un-marriage ceremony. And not all the duel 6, cruel or savvy 7 enough to force you say the words out loud.

Irretrievably broken? When movie stars part, their publicists kiss it off with a kind of more forgiving “irreconcilable differences”. Differences are something you just discover, unpleasantries that just show up one day like unsightly nostril 8 hair. Broken was something we did, to ourselves, our friends, our extended families, in even worse cases, that something people do to their own children. But our marriage was irretrievably broken and the tears welling in my eyes were not just over the cold finality of those words, but the knowledge that they were true.

I blinked in that bad fluorescent 9 light and wondered: shouldn't every bright-eyed couple applying for a marriage license 10 two floors below have to sit through an hour of dissolution court first? Just to appreciate the stakes before registering on wedding.com. I wonder how many people are ever truly prepared to bear the weight of their own vows 11. Till death do us part? It's a catchy 12 slogan, but really just a five-words-string everybody secretly knows can be snipped 13 by legal scissors. The truth: marriage is only as forgiving as the frequency in depth through which you can swallow your own pride. It's only as lasting 14 as your own ability to forgive. Only as permanent as the strength you bring to it every hour .A lot of people grasp this at some point. Sadly, for us, that point was the day we found ourselves here, in the courthouse, wincing 15 with the realization--that the only thing permanent about our marriage, was the two-word phrase that took it apart-- irretrievably broken, that's forever.


Ron Judd is a columnist for "The Seattle Times" and author of the book-- "The Roof-Rack Chronicles"