The Folly of Looking Back: A Treatise on Grief. Part I

 Originally Written June 10, 2022

Grief is a universal human emotion; at some point or another, each of us will experience it in some form. In Damon Young’s essay “How do you mourn the loss of a friendship?”, Young discusses the various similarities between the grief of losing other relationships versus the unique experience of losing a friendship. Having had the misfortune of also experiencing each of these different losses, I found myself captivated by Young’s essay . As I contemplated my own losses throughout my life coupled with the distinct grief each loss produced I also found myself probing the wounds of the two great losses I experienced within three weeks of each other my junior year of high school.  The the complexity of navigating two life changing losses at roughly the same time. Trying to fathom the deterioration and ultimate collapse of my best-friendship, and the tragic death of my cousin through the lens of two additional decades. When Young says, “it's not like the finality of death, where you have no choice but to move on” he hits the nail on the head. The grief of losing one is not equivalent to the grief of losing another, and death, with its permanence, leaves little room for “what ifs”; the grief of losing a friendship, I find, is a never-ending process. 

You see, when grieving a death there are support groups, guided journaling courses, and therapists to help you work your way through it. As Young says, “I had directions. A path”. When my cousin died, as raw and brutal as that grief was, I had others to share my grief with. Others who had loved him also had to now navigate a world in which his larger-than-life personality left a larger-than-life hole in our hearts. We could commiserate. We could share stories. We could prop each other up in our sadness and our pain. There was a sense of community in our collective grief, and that community made it easier to carry the burden of our own personal pain. That wasn’t so in my experience of the loss of my friendship.
         Then, my grief was a solitary entity that only I had to find a way to muddle through. Our shared experiences were now fragmented, and she owned the memories, and I owned the memories, but we were now separate, and there was nobody to share that ownership.

     Friendships are deeply personal, and nobody outside of that friendship can ever truly understand it. We can all understand what it means to be a friend, but the dynamics of each individual friendship are just that: individual. Unfortunately, that individuality leaves potential that someday you will have to navigate the world without it, with no one else to understand your loss.  Like Young, when he states, “But with this, with learning how to mourn the end of a friendship, I’m no closer to an answer than when I began writing. I was hoping I’d figure it out by now. Was sure I would, actually. I was wrong. “, I, too, am no closer to an answer on how to properly grieve the loss of a friendship. There has been a distinct lack of closure no matter how definitively the friendship ended. It has been 22 years since I last saw my best friend from high school, and yet I find myself sometimes wondering how her life is turning out. Does the birth of a child make her wonder about mine? Does naming a child remind her of when we were picking out names for our hypothetical children in our sophomore year? What has she gone on to do with her life? Does she wonder what I have done with mine? Every life milestone comes with a whisper of a memory, a “what if things had turned out differently?” 

 While even now, a certain song or turn of phrase will bring memories of the loss of my cousin, those memories have become more balm to that pain than a source of it. That isn’t so for the loss of my friendship. Innocuous things crop up from time to time, and I find myself picking at the old wound again. After the 2022 Super Bowl half-time line up was announced, I wondered, did she also have the unconscious reaction to grab her phone and call me? Did the excitement of all our favorite artists being in one lineup for the Super Bowl momentarily cause her to forget we haven’t spoken in two decades, and she no longer knew how to call me? Did she even watch it? Or did she watch it with the same enthusiasm of our teen years, reminiscing mentally and wishing to share it with the other? Was it too painful a reminder? Or worse still, have I been relegated to the part of her brain that holds all things that used to be, but aren’t anymore, and so they never cross her mind? Does she, too, ever think about doing a deep dive on the internet, finding a phone number, and calling to apologize; or to see if I ever achieved my life-long dream of meeting Gavin Rossdale? Or might she even call to say she still hates me? There’s no way to know, and every new encounter with the ghost of our friendship leaves me with a reopened wound, haunted by another chance to ponder all the things that might have been. 

These are the petty things that won’t let friendship truly die. The devil really is in the details. The nuance is in all those little things you once shared, things sometimes you wish you could share still, that seem to make the grief of losing a friend, in the long run, so much more poignant than the quick and deep cut of the death of a loved one. There is a clean break that comes with a death, that you just can’t find in the jagged pieces of the end of a friendship.