Divorce at 79 years old? I need a drink

I have just assisted a colleague in attending to an elderly client. This client needed a will done. We are also assisting this client in the matter of a divorce consent orders. An elderly person facing divorce. The couple has been married for 25 years. The man is 79 this year. The woman is 68. I am so disturbed as I cannot get my head around this decision by what appears to be a lucid person. What may be the courses leading to such a drastic action? Can it not be salvaged? The man was 54 when he married her. He was married to her for 25 years. She was 43 when they married. At 68 she faces the prospect of living alone again. Was it such a bad marriage? At this stage of their lives, the marriage must be of a destructive nature for it to be ended in any means other than death. I am so saddened by this. The client appears to be such a pleasant person. I am sure the (soon to be ex) spouse is equally pleasant? How can 2 decent looking people be so bad together? Why at the throes of death does someone decide he or she has irreconcilable differences with the spouse and asks a court to dissolve their marriage? I find this appalling. In old age, all one has is the partner. I see my paternal grandmother’s eyes well up every time we talk about our late grandfather. It is obvious she loved him and still missed him, the last time I saw her, many months ago. I remember the odd occasion I caught my late maternal grandfather eyes, also tinged with sadness, when we had family get togethers and spoke about my late grandmother, who had died many years earlier. I see the different moods of my mother in law whenever my father in law goes away for a trip abroad. She is clearly happier with him around. Even though my own parents bicker at each other, I hear the love each has for the other in their voices. In my own case I love my wife to bits. I have loved her long before we were married and I love her even more now than I did before. I hope to love her for many years to come. I cant imagine ageing without her. That really is a major occupational hazard for family law practitioners. Yes, it is stressful to deal with business failures, business joint venture break-ups, landlord-tenant disputes, even sibling disputes. It is much less stressful to deal with supplier-customer disputes. I cannot however imagine how one copes with dealing with marriage breakdowns on a daily basis. We once had a casual chat in office about this and the answer was – alcohol. Many family law practitioners turn to the bottle as a way to deal with this sort of stress. I can understand why. The case I just mentioned was sad, so sad. So sad it is almost bizarre. If I had to deal with this on a regular basis, I wont discount turning to the bottle to clear my mind, everyday. As it is I had while practising in KL, regularly drank just to unwind. I wasn’t practising family law then, I never did. I shudder to think how badly I might have turned to booze had I been practising family law.