Letting Go

When you lose someone, there will always a time to move on. A grieving period is acceptable. Anger, in moderation, is okay. Eventually, though, the time to let go needs to come.

There are three issues with loss that I feel should be properly addressed, all of which have been on my mind. First is what I'll call "casual loss", or losing someone over time, followed by an immediate loss, when you suddenly and completely eject someone from your life, and finally, I will address death.

"Casual loss" is not something you plan on, and it is rarely caused by a disagreement. Sometimes one person moves away and the relationship suffers. You talk less and less until all you are is an annual Christmas card. It happens to high school friends when they split up and go to different colleges. Some stay close, but most do not. You see that person ten years later at your reunion and she tells you about her husband and two children and you think, My God, I used to know everything about her and now I don't even know her last name.

Casual loss is not heartbreaking as it happens over time. It's only when you look back that you get a sense of nostalgia, but even that doesn't hurt so much. In the time you've lost someone, you've established new relationships to cushion the blow.

These days, there are times I will get an email from a gradeschool friend or run into someone I knew from my old neighborhood. They will say, You look great! We should really get lunch sometime, and I will smile and nod, but the truth is I am not interested in entertaining my past. The truth is I am over missing people who never cared enough to stay in my life in the first place.

The second kind of loss is immediate loss, the kind that tends to happen with most breakups and the reason best friends stop talking. It happens with a fight or another kind of disagreement, when one person can so barely stand the other that an immediate loss is necessary. This is okay. It is often mandatory that a person cuts another out of his or her life. What is not okay is going back on it and causing friction in another person's life because you can't stand to see them happy without you.

I have an ex-boyfriend who sometimes calls and leaves me angry messages. He calls me names and spreads rumors in hopes of provoking me. He tells me I am not capable of love because I do not love him.

This is a perfect example of what is not okay.

Death is the hardest to overcome. Despite what everyone says about it- that it is final, that it is closure- I feel that death is a beginning. Not in a religious way, because I'm not sure if I believe in heaven and hell, but more in a relationship way. It's the end of your relationship with them as living people and the beginning of your time with them as memories. Death is unsettling. There's not ever enough closure. It doesn't seem make your relationship with the desceased final and over- it seems to make it feel like everything is free-falling. You'll always be waiting to have a goodbye conversation and it won't ever come.

In a few days I will be acknowledging the two-year anniversary of my best friend's death. I rarely speak of him and when I do, he is perfect, golden, the only person who has never hurt me. But that isn't the case; it rarely is. He and I fought bitterly and sometimes went months at a time without speaking. For seven years I watched him struggle, abuse, and relapse. I stepped in to help several times and he pushed me away because that's the kind of relationship we had. I wanted to do one thing and he wanted opposite. I began to slowly remove myself from him, built up a wall so I would not have to watch a person I loved self-destruct. I refused to step in a final time even after he apologized and pleaded with me, and in three weeks time he was dead.

The guilt was on me for a long time. It was only after I let my anger go that I felt I could talk about him in a positive way.

I guess that's my moral today. Sometimes you need to let go of loss- and the past- in order to move forward with new relationships and the rest of your life.

Letting go of your past means being aware of your thoughts.
Letting go of your past means forgiving yourself for your mistakes.
Letting go of your past means accepting that there's nothing you can do to change it.