Disclaimer: All facts gleaned from the filings stated hereafter are only as truthful as the petitioner. The tone of this article expresses a style of writing historically employed by America’s greatest writers and, as such, is for opinion purposes only. No intentional harm is due. Do not read if the topic of divorce (even your own) causes you emotional distress. Continue at your own risk.
There are marriages that dissolve with fury. Others vanish in silence, the kind of silence that grows thick in a shared house, that settles over dinner tables where words once lived. For Virginia Louise Hill and Michael Edward Hill, the end began, officially, on April 28, 2025, with a petition filed in Jackson County, Missouri.
They married in the fall of 1997, at a time when permanence still felt possible. For twenty-seven years, they built a shared life in Independence. The fault lines weren’t sudden. They didn’t erupt. They accumulated, sediment-like, until the separation on January 1, 2025, made what had long been true finally visible: the marriage was irretrievably broken.
Virginia, represented by attorney R. Scott Richart of Albano Richart Welch & Bajackson, LLC, asked the court for what the law promises but rarely delivers neatly—equity. No children bind them now. No maintenance is sought. She works. He is retired. Both, the petition notes, can stand on their own.
What remains is the matter of division. Of what they acquired together. Of what was never truly shared. Of what can be cleanly parceled and what cannot. In court, such things are reduced to lists—assets, debts, obligations. But underneath, there is always the unspoken history: the years no judgment can weigh.
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