very Thanksgiving we visited the island of Nantucket as a family. In November, when the wind is strong and the island is empty of summer visitors, you can imagine what it was like back when ships left the harbor in search of whales. It’s a mystical place in the fall, with a gray morning fog covering the island and the sound of the ocean crashing on the shores. Throughout my marriage, this trip was always our family’s favorite. But now I carried a sadness greater than anything I’d ever experienced before.

Every year, on Thanksgiving morning, we drove from our rental to the beach where an unassuming little shingled house sat up on a sand dune, looking out toward the water. The year before, the house had been surrounded by sandbags to protect it from the encroaching ocean. This year, as we drove up to where the house once stood, it was gone. The ocean had taken it over.

We parked our cars and got out. This would be the first year we didn’t stand in front of that little house for a family picture. I imagined the heartbreak of the family who owned it. The house was gone, and that felt like a message from the universe: This chapter is over.

Hunter and I walked down to the beach as all the kids scattered along the shoreline and his parents’ dog, Champ, ran among us. I wanted to soak up every minute we had together. At the time, everything in my life felt untethered. My brother-in-law was dying from cancer, my husband was struggling with addiction, and I’d just learned about his infidelity. Nothing felt normal, and yet I clung to this tradition. I clung to my family.

As we stood on the beach, the sky gray and the wind strong, I leaned my head against Hunter. “How far can we step back before we fall?” I said to him as I turned, my head still resting against his. With our foreheads firmly pressed together, we each took a step back. We tried to balance ourselves as we continued to step back to the point where we could still hold each other up without falling.

Our lives were breaking but I desperately wanted us to be okay. I needed him to hold me up and he needed me. That was what I’d based my life on and what I strongly believed—that we needed each other. Neither of us could survive without the other. But in the end, in so many ways, we both broke. The question I couldn’t answer then was: How would I survive?