A page from an empanelled mediator’s desk on a Tuesday afternoon when only one party came to the second session. The first session, two weeks earlier, had been attended by both parties. The companion piece on matrimonial mediation explained traces what a typical session looks like; this piece is about what happens when the structure does not hold.
The room was booked from 2:30 to 4:00. K. arrived at 2:18 and waited in the small reception area outside the mediator’s door. She had a folder. She was wearing the clothes she had worn to the first session, two weeks earlier. I noticed the clothes only when she pointed out, later, that she had worn them deliberately.
At 2:32, R. had not arrived. I texted R., as agreed in session one. R. did not respond. I called. The phone rang and went to voicemail. The voicemail was full.
At 2:38, I went to the reception area and asked K. if she had heard from R.. She said no. She said she had been worried all morning. She said she had texted R. four times since Sunday and had not received a reply. She said R. had also not responded to the lawyer’s office through whose referral the mediation had been arranged.
I asked K. whether she wanted to wait or to begin with what we could begin. She said - and I have written this down as precisely as I can remember - that she wanted to wait until 2:45 and then, if R. had not arrived, she wanted to talk to me, because she was here and the room was here and she had taken the afternoon off work and she did not see why the absence should defeat the use of the time.
I made tea. I do not always make tea. I had begun the kettle before I had decided.
At 2:45, R. had not arrived and had not responded. K. and I sat down in the room. She put the folder on the table. The folder contained, she said, the documents she had been asked to bring - the asset disclosure, the proposed schedule of property division, the draft of the maintenance arrangement - and a sheet of paper she had handwritten the night before, in which she had tried to formulate what she wanted out of the conversation we were not having.
I asked her, gently, whether she wanted to read it to me. She did not at first. She said she had written it for R.. She said she had spent four hours on it on Sunday. She said the thing she wanted to say in it was a particular thing she had not been able to say in the first session because R. had not let her finish. She said she had practised reading it aloud in front of the mirror.
After about twelve minutes, in which we talked about other things - the weather, the difficulty of finding a parking spot - she said she would like to read it to me. She did. It took eight minutes. The note was, in places, very angry. In places it was tender. In places it was practical. It ended with a sentence that was, by far, the most useful sentence she said all afternoon: “I do not know if this is for the marriage or for me, but I think I need to have said it.”
I asked her whether she wanted to give it to R.. She said she did not know. I asked her whether she wanted to read it again to R., if R. came to the next session. She said she did not know. She said that, in some way, having read it aloud in the room with me had changed it - that it now had a witness, even if not the witness she had intended.
At 3:34, R. messaged. R. said the day had been impossible and could we reschedule. K. read the message and put the phone face down on the table. She did not respond. We sat for another six minutes. She drank the last of the tea.
At 3:44, she said: “I think the session has been useful even though only one of us came.” I said yes. She said: “I would like to keep the note for myself. I would not like to give it to R..” I said: that is your decision. She said: “I would like to reschedule the next session. But I would like a week, not two.” I said: I will check the calendar.
She left at 3:51. The folder went with her. The handwritten note, folded in half, was at the back of the folder.
At 4:02, after she had gone, I wrote a closing note for the file. The note recorded the date, the times, the absence, the partial session, and a single observation: K. had arrived to find the room empty of her partner and had used the empty room to say something to herself that the marriage had not given her room to say. The session had not produced an agreement. It had produced a witness.
The matter eventually settled, four months later, under §13B with the cooling-off period waived. The note K. read in the room that afternoon was not, to my knowledge, ever read by R.. K. kept it. I do not know whether she has read it since.
The companion piece on two mediators on the cases they turn away addresses the matters that cannot be mediated. This piece is the opposite: the matter where the room had partly worked, despite the structural failure of attendance, because one party had arrived prepared to use it.
Sometimes the mediation room does its work with only one person in it. The work is not the agreement; the work is the room itself, which has been built to receive the sentence the marriage will not.