Mortgage and Marriage Modification

My financial adviser was blunt: "Get yourself a good lawyer, accountant, and private investigator."

I was stunned, but the sharpness of his words pierced my defenses. I hung up the phone and gazed out my office window, trying to make sense of what Chris had just told me. My husband—my rock, my best friend, my confidant—had just emptied his IRA account.

My husband, Joel, and I had raised two wonderful sons, and we were about to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary with a trip to Italy. Our older boy was attending a private university in Boston while his brother was excitedly sizing up East Coast colleges. I had looked forward to settling into comfortable years in our beautiful Long Island home. Or so I thought.

At 53, I had worked my way up to senior publications editor at a large nonprofit. When the children were young, I had been a stay-at-home mom, managing the household bills. But once I found myself toggling between soccer tournaments and work deadlines, I was happy to scrape that financial responsibility onto my husband's plate. With a solo law practice in business and real estate, Joel was comfortable with money. And, truth be told, handing over the responsibility fulfilled a longing of mine to feel taken care of, something I, as a self-professed feminist, would never have admitted openly.

I'd come a long way from my working-class Brooklyn Italian roots, but I still believed in my parents' lessons about hard work and integrity. My mother toiled nights packing candy boxes at a Coney Island factory for mortgage money. My dad, a procurement officer for the U.S. Navy who'd elevated himself from forklift driver, never missed a day of work. He rose to director without a college degree. My parents pooled their earnings to buy a modest home and achieve the American Dream their immigrant parents crossed the ocean for.

On the night of the showdown, my husband and I sat at the kitchen table his mother had hand-painted. I calmly told him I knew about the empty accounts.

His body slumped in relief. "I'm tapped out," he said. A look of shame crept over him. His pleading blue eyes looked tired and rimmed with dark circles.

I thought of the lyrics to the classic rock song "The Weight," by The Band: "And you put the load right on me." I grew furious.

The $300,000 we had extracted from our home through a subprime mortgage refinance to pay off my husband's business debts two years earlier was gone. He had not earned a dime the previous year, had been paying our real-estate taxes on a credit card, and had mowed through the annuity we'd set up for our kids' college expenses. I didn't need that private eye. My husband eventually came clean about everything—the get-rich-quick schemes, the money doled out to business partners and friends, even the drug habit. Though I knew he had dabbled in drugs earlier in our years together, I believed that was over. It turned out that he was a smart, high-functioning heroin and methadone addict who hid it well. In retrospect, of course, the signs were there. But I had not seen—did not want to see—the indicators until the results of his behavior stared me in the face.

Ever since I'd known him, Joel had been overly generous, showering gifts, dinners, dollars, and time on anyone in need. A friend, Mike, once told me how Joel had dragged him to the motor vehicle bureau and paid the fines so Mike could have use of his car. Joel's heart was one of the things I loved about him. But clearly, his "big-shotism" had gone awry.

I spent the week in a daze, afraid to act and afraid not to. We retreated into a stony silence punctuated by ugly middle-of-the night arguments.

I didn't indulge my self-pity for long, however. Within days, I found the credit-card bills he'd hidden, the homeowner's insurance he'd canceled, even an e-mail from the wife of an incarcerated client thanking my husband for the money he'd sent.

I discovered our subprime mortgage, like the furnace in the movie The Shining, was on the verge of exploding, the principal growing by $1,500 a month. Soon the payment would skyrocket to more than $4,500, three times the current payment.

Unable to afford everything on my salary alone, I listed the home I loved with a Realtor. When prospective buyers filtered through our living room, I smiled, passed myself off as a soon-to-be empty nester looking forward to easier-to-maintain quarters. After the door closed, I wept.

Then something unexpected happened. We received a letter from our mortgage company offering a loan modification. Though not ideal, the interest-only payment for five years bought us time and threw a life preserver to a drowning marriage. With the house under my feet, I took a long look at my husband and let compassion seep in like a sliver of morning light. He had suffered too. Just as the rest of the country was slipping into economic collapse, Joel was going through addiction therapy, accepting the loss of his law practice, and starting a job as an assistant at a friend's firm. When he admitted all the frightening things that had happened to him, he confessed that the possibility of losing me was the scariest.

Still in treatment, Joel steps gingerly, trying to knit the fabric of his life back together strand by strand and heal the damage. He continues to work as a counsel at his friend's firm, where his knowledge is respected. He tells me far too often how much he loves me and how appreciative he is of our life together. Things are simple: we're excited about the purchase of a new barbecue, he installs a screen door, we hear our son's band play at a local club.

In time, I was able to replace blame with forgiveness because his actions echoed his words. And I've learned that resentment and blame are poison. I've not been perfect. My anger has flared up. But I have come to know that compassion and anger cannot occupy the same space at the same moment. Nowadays, my accounts may not be as full as they once were. But I'm grateful that my life is.