When Mutuality Ends
“Well, originally I started looking for a therapist to help me reconcile my faith and sexuality. But um, well about six months ago, my best friend and companion for the last fifteen years died by suicide. And so I guess I am needing to pivot a bit to grief counseling.”
My new therapist gave a sympathetic look. “Yeah, I saw that in your file. Maybe just to start with, could you tell me, what did Lizzy mean to you?”
“Oh, um—well…let me think real quick.”
“Take your time”
What did Lizzy mean to you?
“I guess she uh…”
[Wait, what was I going to say?]
What did Lizzy mean to you?
“Sorry, She um, well we had just…uh.”
[How do I start this!]
What did Lizzy mean to you?
“Sorry, no one has ever asked me this before.”
[Lizzy is dead.]
I start to cry.
What did Lizzy mean to you?
I suspect I will spend the rest of my life answering that question. It’s tricky, though. What did she mean to me? How do you articulate what someone means to you, when you don’t know who you are apart from them? My therapist might as well have asked, “what do you mean to you?”
When mutuality ends, we enter the alarming process of remembering what we are made for in spite of what we experience. In other words, we grieve.
Sometimes, processing grief feels like trying to peel a stubborn price tag off glass. The adhesive is too strong, and there’s never a clean separation, only an incessant scraping to get the residue off. It’s especially frustrating because eventually you realize you’ll never be able to get the residue of someone else’s life off of your own. And then the sadness kicks in because you didn’t want the separation in the first place. You didn’t choose any of this, but you will feel the pain of it. The residued outline of their life tattooed on your body. It’s not that you feel naked, you feel exposed—lacking.
I remember during that first year of grief this phantom version of reality kept slipping through the cracks of my day. In one particular instance, I was driving around to get Christmas presents in Chicago. I was playing some music and singing along, and for some reason I placed my right arm on the armrest between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s seat. I turned my palm upward, and just waited. I tried so hard to imagine Lizzy into existence. I tried so hard to will her to be there, sitting in the passenger seat next to me, singing along. But it never happened. My hand remained open, alone, exposed. I slowly pulled my arm back to my side, embarrassed at being so vulnerable, and hurt by her absence.
I didn’t get to hold her hand when it ended. I didn’t get to hold her hand and say I love you when she so desperately needed it. How I would have wrapped my arms around her and covered her in my love. “Just breathe, just breathe...Lizzy, hold onto me, hold onto me.” But that never happened either. It should have though. It should have ended much differently. It shouldn’t have ended at all.
During that first year after Lizzy died I jotted down, “God, I don’t know what to do with the love I have for her! Where do I put it? I thought that when she left that the love I have for her would just flow out of the hole in my heart she left behind. But it’s not going anywhere. It’s just pooling in my heart. And everyday it continues to rise. I hurt, and I seek to pour out love. I see beauty, and I reach out to love someone—I reach out for her, but she’s not there.”
Not all wounds heal. Well, at least not all of them will this side of eternity. But I don’t think that means the wound will kill you, or worse, turn you into some sort of shadow version of yourself. I am reminded of Christ as the wounded healer. God in his wisdom decided life comes from the wounds. No, maybe the wound doesn’t heal. But maybe there is a way to steward the pain in such a way that we love more, and from that love God gives life.
It’s been six years since Lizzy died, and every day I’ve missed her in different ways. Slowly, ever so slowly, it occurs to me that I have survived. That somehow “a love beyond my power to love has kept my heart alive.”1 Of the many things I’ve learned, mutuality is certainly one of them. Both in its absence, but also in my desire for it. Because without it, I realize I am found without my humanity. Or as Buechner puts it, “You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.”2
When mutuality ends, and you enter grief, go through the process. Let the pain of loss sharpen your memory of who you are and what you are designed for. When you are able to, seek out mutuality again. Take up the pen, as Dante says, “when Love breathes wisdom into me, and go find the signs for what he speaks within.” (Purgatorio, 24:52-54). Or go further, pick up the feather that death left behind, dip it in the blood of Christ, and with it write of the power of his love. Write the death of death itself.
Frederick Buechner, A Crazy Holy Grace.
Ibid.
“What did Lizzy mean to you?”
Attempting to force an entire person into the boxes known as words—whether it be a single sentence of boxes or a whole book—is one of the most painfully fruitless endeavors I have ever had to do in my therapist’s office. How foolish it feels to try to fit an entire person into some words!