In the past several years, I’ve had to say goodbye to people. In my previous life as a nurse, I had the experience of sitting with people at the end of their life. I always found it a humbling and loving and honorable experience. It’s sad, definitely, for the people who remain, and it was especially sad in the case of the pediatric patients. But it was also amazing to see how people loved each other. How their lives touched each other so much. How much they mean to each other. And it felt very privileged to be the other person in the room full of love.
I wish I could say in my own life, saying goodbye went the same way. But unlike in nursing, we who remain also remain with all of our feelings, experiences and paperwork. In the last eight years, both of my in-laws have passed away. And this experiences came with a lot of other stuff. They were each different situations. But the reality, of course, was that dealing with death included dealing with all of the stuff of their lives. More specifically, how they had lived, how they had treated others, how we had treated them-you know the unresolved stuff of relationships. Much harder.
I wish I could say I learned something here, but unresolved stuff in relationships are an issue for me even when death isn’t involved.
Well perhaps I did learn something. I learned unresolved stuff makes everything around death harder. I also learned you don’t control how things get resolved with that person. Some people leave you to resolve things alone. We’ve all experienced that in non-death ways. The friend that leaves your life with no explanation. The notion of closure or some final understanding doesn’t always happen in a tidy way. Sometimes you’re left wondering why they did what they did-and when death is involved-there is no hope of final conversation. Instead you have to resolve your own feelings independently. Perhaps you make up stories about what they thought or felt. Then perhaps you react to these imaginary stories. But the reality is you don’t know why they did what they did or maybe you don’t know what they felt. What can you do but accept the messy unanswered questions that you have?
I’ve also been thinking about the other end of relationships-the ones where they don’t die. The friendship ends that aren’t precipitated by a big upset, but rather a slow fade. In these ends, I often feel sad about what we once had while being faced with the reality that it doesn’t exist anymore. I often think perhaps we could still be friends if x happened. Or I wonder how they feel about the end and the distance.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m not usually good at addressing problems in relationships head on. And perhaps that is the lesson I’ve been learning. I want to talk about my feelings with the people in my life before things are so distant that there is no repair. I’ve been practicing with my family in the hopes that we will be better at listening to each other. That we won’t wait until it’s too late to say what we need to say.
The Next 38 