The Golden Divorce Anniversary

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

Should I mark—or even acknowledge—the golden anniversary of a marriage ending? This is the difficult question racing through my mind this month as the 50th anniversary of my parents’ divorce approaches. I am not quite sure about the answer.

In the late 1940s, just after World War II ended, Kathleen Mavourneen Gleason and Kevin Peter O’Brien were sweethearts at Cathedral High School in Burlington, Vermont. The relationship progressed, so Kay and Obie set a wedding date for September 22, 1951 and planned to launch a life together.

My father and his family overslept and were late for the early morning ceremony at St. Patrick’s chapel in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Mom almost called the wedding off. At the last minute, she changed her mind and went through with it.

The description in the local Burlington Free Press a few days later suggests it was a lovely fall event at the stone church on a hill overlooking Lake Champlain. My cousin Michael Winslow, 15 years my senior, was their ring bearer. He recalls watching my parents in a very passionate kiss. So, obviously, there was love in the beginning.

Two decades later, just before St. Patrick’s Day and as early spring snow still lingered on the ground, a late-night fire broke out at the historic Burlington cathedral. Feeding ravenously on heavily varnished wooden pews, the inferno engulfed both the lovely St. Patrick’s Chapel and the beautiful cathedral. It was a fiery destructive act of arson unleashed by an unhinged former altar boy. When morning arrived, the sacred place where my parents had exchanged their vows, and the site of numerous other family baptisms, first communions, marriages, and funerals, was in irreparable ruins. 

Ironically, at just about the same time fire destroyed that lovely old church, my parents’ marriage also erupted into flames. The cause of that marital blaze? Maybe they got married too young—at age 20, they were not old enough to drink champagne at their reception. Maybe it was ongoing financial troubles. Maybe it was my father’s alleged infidelity with a Northern Utah rodeo queen.

I may never know the exact reason. In the summer of 1970, my father drove us from our Utah house to Sacramento, California. I thought we were on a family vacation at the home of his sister, who also was my mother’s good friend. He left us there, however, and filed for divorce when he got back to Utah.

Stranded in California with no income, no job, no car, and four kids, my mother could not afford a lawyer. She signed the divorce papers as drafted. A Utah court entered a final decree ending the marriage in November 1970—fifty years ago.

Both of my parents are gone now. My father died in November 1991 from liver cancer. Mom passed away in April 2007, after congestive heart failure. I am left behind, with my siblings, to mull over the meaning of our parents’ golden divorce anniversary.

I’m not qualified to assess the impact of divorce generally, and I want to be cautious about seeming to judge my parents’ decisions/actions when I never walked in their shoes. I can only discuss the divorce I knew, but as I see it, there was a lot of negative fallout from the events that occurred a half century ago.

Mom was a good Irish-Catholic girl who never wanted to be anything other than a homemaker and mother. On the cusp of middle age, she was forced to rebuild her life. With no college or vocational training, she worked various blue collar or service jobs to scratch out a living and support herself and us kids. For many years, her life was a roller coaster of raw emotion.

Even after a family friend—a Catholic priest—helped her get a church annulment, she never dated and did not remarry. She survived the ordeal, but never fully recovered from the ugly divorce. My life was altered forever too, in too many ways to discuss in one blog article.

I did not want to take sides, but yet was right in the middle of it.

I had to navigate around my mother’s anger and my father’s avoidance.

We had a wonderful family before the split, but afterwards were stigmatized as a broken home.

I knew only surrogate fathers, not my real one.

Quite frankly, in many ways it was dreadful. To this day, I strongly believe no nine year old should have to confront the emotional turmoil and uncertainty unleashed in my life by the court’s November 1970 decree. Indisputably, the divorce seriously injured the innocent bystanders in our family, especially I fear, my older brother.

Yet, looking back at the last fifty years, I would not change them, for several reasons. (OK, I might change the divorce to alleviate my mother’s pain, but that’s the only reason.)

Without the divorce, I probably would not have experienced and enjoyed the unusual boyhood I write about in my soon-to-be-published memoir Monastery Mornings. The book describes how, in our time of need, Mom reached out to the Trappist monks who used to live in Huntsville, Utah.

The monks befriended us, and to paraphrase the Ninety-first psalm, bore us up lest we dash our foot against a stone. Those formative relationships would not have developed absent the divorce.

I had no consistent fatherhood role model growing up, and thus none to emulate in adulthood. I can’t fix cars or do home repairs—my wife Vicki fixed our furnace when it broke. I do not manage our finances. I don’t golf, appreciate good scotch, or play poker. I never coached a little league sports team.

Those “shortcomings” may have been a net plus. I was forced to craft my own unique version of fatherhood.

I really wanted to be around our children. I wrote/directed several school holiday programs and even wrote a new Christmas carol for one of them (see: New Christmas Carol Prepares Room at the Inn for Jesus and Santa). A friend and I were the first set of “room dads” at our kids’ school. Ever the lawyer, I used a mediation style of discipline—just ask any of our kids about the wingback “discussion chairs” in our living room.

It all suited me, and so far at least, the children seem fine too. I may have been a very different type of father without the daunting experiences of living through a divorce and not having a father myself. I would not trade away the life I’ve had.

Surviving and even recovering, however, is not transcending, which begs the question of forgiveness. My book Monastery Mornings outlines in detail many of my “father/son” issues. After reading drafts (it will be published in August 2021), many have asked me, “Did you forgive your father?”

Fifty years later, I still am trying to answer that question. (Remember, the definition of “Irish Alzheimer’s” is: remember the grudge but forget the reason.) I can say I am more open to trying to understand my father. Why did he leave? What was his side of the story? How was my mother difficult to live with? But, alas, I do not understand yet.

As for forgiveness? On this golden anniversary of the divorce, that is a work in progress. Check back with for me an update in 2030, when we mark the diamond jubilee.

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press in August 2021.