My friend is leaving. My aunt died. More sad stuff will happen in life in the years to come. But it’s all OK because it’s all part of the natural way of things. It hurts, and it aches. It’s the way of things, though. There is no real vacuum. Bubbles do not last forever. You can never go back to what once was. No matter how hard you try, what once was is gone. You are changed, so that old, familiar place isn’t even being experienced by the same individual.
I know this sounds weird, but the ONLY way to get any closure…and with these things I need closure…is to see this all the way through to the gut-punching, heart-wrenching end. I am not going to let this opportunity to feel such deep sadness slip away.
I’ve done it before, let these things slip away. I’ve avoided and masked. I’ve pretended that reality was something other than what it was. I’ve let people…just leave.
It’s awful…never works. I just wind up burning bridges and hurting feelings.
It doesn’t have to take much. Give them a hug and tell them that you’ll never forget them. It’s that simple. That’s good bye between people who care enough about each other to be sad at parting. It’s enough to say good bye to a loved one beyond the reach of life.
It’s funny, but I am having one of the most profound, full-circle moments of my life this week. I believe that most things that haunt us are the spirits of injuries from deep into our childhoods. Through meditation, I’ve figured out that my childhood injury regarding loss and closure was the first death that affected me. When I was a freshman in high school, my grandfather died. Ironically, he was the father of the aunt whose passing I currently mourn. At the time he passed, we lived in Mexico. It was right in the middle of the school year, so my parents had to make the difficult call to travel to the U.S. and leave me and my younger brother at home when they went to the funeral. It must have been such a hard call to make. In the end, I never said good bye, never closed the circle of the relationship. It was the first death that really touched me.
I never got over that pain, that sorrow. I used to lose myself something terrible when I visited his grave. The hurt returned each time. Except this past April, when I took my wife and kids to visit my grandparents at the cemetery, that intense grief was gone. Instead, I just felt happy to have my family with me, to share a part of our family history with my sons and my wife. I couldn’t figure out what was different. Maybe it just took decades to heal. I didn’t know.
But now I’m realizing that I’ve been reliving that moment of injury my whole life…over and over again…for nearly 30 years. I’ve been looking for a way to get over abrupt loss left wide open, unclosed, by recreating it at every moment of parting, at every moment of loss in my life. I relive the moment…and run. I run away from it. I don’t say good bye. I don’t close the loop. I don’t see friends off when they leave. I don’t fully mourn family members when they pass.
At least that what I used to do. It dawned on me that I’ve been doing it all wrong. I have been so, so wrong.
You don’t turn your back on loss. You turn to face it. You close the loop. You grab hold of grief. You say the difficult good bye. You give the hugs. You dry the tears. You do all that, and you put the loss to rest. You do it for both you and, in the case of friends moving on, you do it for them. You do it because you care. You do it because you want peace. You do it because it is right.
You can just give me a fist-bump instead, too, if you like. That’s cool. Just don’t pretend that what’s there isn’t there, that grief and loss will just go away. They do not. You have to release them.
This is the truth I have learned from a circle 30 years in the making.
Illuminate Possibilities 