Should I Take the Hint and Let Go of the Friendship? Grief, Friendship, and Ambiguous Loss

An old friend from high school recently contacted me and asked me to write about grief from this perspective: letting go of old friendships not out of conflict, but out of attrition; the way social circles can narrow as we get older.    The grief that comes with that.  The uncertainty.   The way social media can make us feel simultaneously connected to old friends, but can also reveal how our lives have moved on, and cause us to question if the friendship is real, true, and mutually felt.

What I am talking about is an idea in grief counseling called ambiguous loss.  You can read lots on the internet about ambiguous loss.  There's even a Wikipedia entry on Ambiguous Loss .  To shorthand it, it means that it's a loss without closure, a loss without answers, a loss (sometimes) without the understanding or acknowledgement from others. Ambiguous loss, to me, most often takes the form of a changed relationship, rather than a death.  In theory, you are still here in my life.  In practice, you are gone.  This happens in marriages.  This happens with parents and adult children.  This happens in friendships.  This happens on Facebook.

Specifically, my friend wanted to know my thoughts on grieving very old friends - close, childhood friends - friends that would always be there.  But with the passing of time and the space of living in different places, these friendships appear to have been let go.  There is the added cognitive dissonance of seeing all about them on social media.

Here's what I imagine happens for many of us:  We have a friendship that used to feel close.  We reach out and notice the person is not reaching back as often or is unreliable.  We feel hurt and talk ourselves out of it - "Oh, he is just busy.  Oh, her mom just moved and she was overwhelmed with that.  Oh, he just got a new job.  Oh, they just had a baby.  Well, we have lived in different cities for 20 years.  Well, do you really expect Jim to remember your birthday when you haven't seen him face to face for 5 years?"    These are our very resilient defense mechanisms to talk ourselves out of being too hurt too fast.  Most of us try to be reasonable adults.

And then we respond.  I put us human beings in two categories of responders:  The reacher-outers and the withdrawers.  When feeling a little abandoned, you might be someone who reaches out more.  "I'll fix this" you think.  "I'll be the 'bigger' person,'" you might say to yourself.  Or, you might be someone who withdraws or at least does NOT reach out.  "Humph," you think. "I'll wait and see what they do next."

And then, whichever way you are, you assess the friend's response or lack thereof.  You collect more data to know if you should be hurt, angry, happy, or grievous. 

In the cases we are talking about today, your friend continues to be more absent than present.  Less involved with you, more involved with other parts of their life.

Here is the next choice you have...how to think about this:

1) Our friendship is over.  I don't want it to be over.  I am deeply hurt.

2)  Our friendship is over and I accept this is part of the natural ebb and flow of life.

3)  Our friendship is over and if I am honest with myself, I am relieved too, because I was ready to put my efforts to other friendships anyway.

4) Our friendship is not over.  It is in a time of 'breathing room.'  I feel somewhat hurt, but I respect my friend's need for breathing room.

5)  Our friendship is not over, it's just that we both have changed a little (or a lot), we have to renavigate a new way to be friends together.

6)  I have no idea what is going on with this friendship.  I would like to check in with this friend and see if everything is ok.

There are no right or wrong choice in how to think about it, but I just want to point out that there are choices.  Other, very individual variables are also at play - what does a close friendship mean to you? What do you need out of that?  Are you an extrovert or introvert?  Are you someone who tends to have very high expectations of those in your life or are you a 'live and let live' kind of person?

After all of these thoughts and questions, now, let us assume that you really decide to let go of this friendship.  That it is too painful for you to continue to hope to be connected when this other person and he/she has clearly moved on or has very little to give.  How to grieve them when they are still there and you still see their happy face on Facebook and Instagram?

One simple idea to consider is blocking them or unfriending them.  If it hurts to see this person, maybe you don't need to see them as often.

But that is only a surface level change.  I'll go a little deeper, if you don't mind:

During the time I first separated from my ex-husband, my aunt, who is widowed said to me, "I think what you are going through is worse than what I went through."  And the very fair-minded, reasonable therapist part of me thought, "We really can't measure one person's hardship or grief against another person's.  It's all relative.  It's all terribly sad"  And another part of me - my non-professional self - thought: "Yes.  What I am going through is worse than death."  And I know I felt this way because like all divorced people with kids,  I knew my then husband would be in my life after the divorce.  I would be reminded daily of the loss of my family as I knew it.

One suggestion from a therapist that I found very helpful was to write a eulogy for my marriage.  I've been to a lot of funerals, as you know - so this was a concept that I had already thought a great deal about.  The best eulogies I've ever heard are the ones that capture some essence of the person who died.  I wrote a eulogy for my marriage, just for myself - what, who and why was my marriage at its best?  What was the most beautiful essence of it?  It was a tangible and cathartic way to acknowledge that and begin to let it go. 

You could do the same thing when letting go of an important friendship or any other ambiguous loss.

I would also suggest reading almost anything by Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun, who is my go-to role model on acceptance.  We lose people in our life, but they are still there.  We lose who they were to us.  We lose the love, care, nurturing, fun, etc., that we once received from that relationship.  That is sad.  There's no way that's not sad.  It's ok to let it be sad.

My friend who wrote me also alluded to age and the place childhood friendships hold in our hearts and what does it mean to 'let go' of them?  Can I have deep affection and nostalgia for what we once had without the pain of knowing that is in the past? 

I think it depends on what you hope for and need.  Are you relying on those friendships for intimacy and vulnerability?  That might be painful and unrealistic.

But, personally, I've found an unexpected comfort out of these connections on social media.  Rather than thinking of 'letting go' of these relationships, what I experience is a feeling of honoring them.  And maybe that's how I grieve (I wrote a eulogy for my marriage, after all).  I think of a boy I had a crush on in third grade who is my Facebook friend (David Crane, if you are reading this, I'm talking about you.)  David taught me how to do a backdive at Saxony pool and he was really nice to my little sister, so these are good reasons for a third grade crush.  I like seeing his happy family on Facebook even though we are not close friends.  It gives me a good feeling of being connected to summers in my childhood and knowing that people I think fondly of are doing well.  I honor my past, our shared past, and the little bright spot of a boy who took the time to teach me to do a backdive. 

Finally, I would say this...many of our human brains seem to want clear cut answers.  If a friendship or any relationship is toxic, cruel, all take and no give, I say, grieve it and let it go.  But, if it is two people of good will who have just grown apart, I recommend trying to be ok in the grey area.

See You In Another Life - Grieving Old Lives, Lives Not Lived and Dreaming Our Future Lives into Being

I am barely twenty one years old, and I am leaning into the window of the plane (I always choose the window seat), to see, for the first time in my life, the island of Manhattan.  A ridiculous swath of skyscrapers, the big green splotch of Central Park, the Statue of Liberty.  I'm not in the know with words like Upper East Side or Chelsea or Soho.  But I see it as a three dimensional map of adventure.  Of humanity.  Of life.  It is the sound of the SNL saxophone.  It’s Paul Simon singing “Late in the Evening.”  It’s glamour and dirt.  I love it and I haven’t even landed.

I am on a journey that seems both destined and totally improbable.  I am a girl from the Midwest.  I’ve never been on vacation anywhere but the Lake of the Ozarks and Florida.  I’ve never eaten in an Indian restaurant.  I’ve never had a friend whose second language in English.  I’ve never been overseas.  This is why the trip seems improbable.  Yet, here I am being flown to New York City to stay in the Waldorf-Astoria for one night, attend a fancy event, and be flown the next day to Washington, D.C. for a ceremony where Lady Freedom will be helicoptered over the Capital and placed, having been reguilded, at her rightful place on top of the dome.  This all to hang out with a friend of mine.  A boy friend, but not boyfriend.  A maybe in the future friend.  A you should probably think about marrying this guy friend.  A I’m not ready for this friend. 

When I land at the Laguardia airport, I’ve been instructed on getting a cab and I do it, as I do a lot of things.  Acting as if I’m not scared, as if I know what I’m doing, until I am not scared and I know what I’m doing.  Getting my purse settled and coat next to me in the back seat, I look out at the grey, low sky.  The speed, smell of the people, city, cars, buildings, the general mutedness of the colors and vague dirtiness of all the people and machines working, working, working.  It is all exactly as I imagined.  Both how it looks and how it feels.  I’ve never carried something in my imagination before that turns out to be so exactly and also more exactly than I imagined.  I love it.  I light a cigarette in the backseat, as I hurtle toward Park Avenue, because this is what you do in New York City, sophisticated things,  gritty things, risky things.  This is where I am destined to be.  This is someplace - what does it feel like?  As if I'd been here before. 

I am sure you're not surprised to know that I ended out dating this young man for awhile.

It's a funny thing that happens when you are in a relationship at a young age.  Maybe at any age?  My dreams got mixed up with his dreams.  I forgot about New York City and how much I loved it.  He was from the East Coast and had a life in Washington, D.C.  When I moved to D.C. after college and we started dating, for that chapter of my life, I made D.C. my dream, and all the things that I imagined in a life with him there, fitting into his life.   As young people do, we broke up.  I re-imagined my dreams, but somehow felt that NYC was beyond me at the ripe old age of 24.

When we are young, we all have big and little ideas, plans, hopes, and dreams of what our lives might be like.  And inevitably we make certain choices.  Going to social work school and being a therapist in private practice was definitely one of my dreams.  I am living that.  I don't live someone else's dream of a life in D.C.  But I also don't live one of my dreams of some kind of adventure in New York City.  

I hear the wistfulness of clients who feel certain paths are closed to them - the man who dreamed of being a pilot, but gave that up for a more 'practical' career that allowed him to be more available for family.  The woman who didn't marry her adored college sweetheart because she thought she was too young, but wonders if that would have been a happier life than the marriage she ended up in.   The woman who never pursued her theater career because she became a mother and pursued the dream of family life instead.  I think, by middle age, we all have versions of our life that we we realize are closed to us.  They are in the past.

Another way our dreams or versions of our life can end is through life events that are not of our choosing - a divorce, a death, a sick family member.  I have a friend who got divorced in the past year and he said, "It was like I had a painting that was almost complete - like a paint by numbers and many of the colors were filled in.  It wasn't done, but I knew what it would look like.  When my wife wanted a divorce, the whole painting got ruined.  I don't know what life is going to look like now."  I think of that painting as their shared dream.  The dream of the life and family you have with that one person.  In a divorce or death, that version of your life has to change whether you want it to or not.

During the time my marriage was ending, I felt much the same thing.  I would pray out loud, sobbing to God, "I don't want this."  I just wanted my life I had.  It was like a temper tantrum with God - make this go away!  But as time has gone on, I feel differently.  Another friend of mine used to call me "Picket Fence Katy" very shortly after my divorce - teasing me that I better get married again because he saw me as a 'picket fence type.'  I laughed, but I also had something that was a secret to even me in those early months.  I know that I look like a Picket Fence Katy, but I also know I have a New York City Katy in me.  When my 'painting' got torn up at the end of my marriage, I began to see that I have many dreams, still.  There are several versions of what my life might be that feel joyful and beautiful to me.  

I have a bias - which is that I see things through a lens of grief.  As we begin a new year, as 2018 gets under way, many of us take stock of where we are at.  What we want to begin, begin again, or things we want to stop in our lives all together.  If there are versions of our life that we are wistful for, I think we need to acknowledge and grieve them.  Grieving them means allowing ourselves to feel sad and even angry.  It also means we need to be clear with ourselves where we made choices.  

Acknowledging our choices keeps us from becoming bitter.  So, take stock - did I make those choices for me or did I make them for someone else?  If I consistently make choices that sacrifice what I dream for my life, what toll is that taking on me?  What else can I imagine?  When I look back on my life at the 85 years old, what do I want to see?  Am I doing those things?  If there are pursuits like being a pilot or an artist or a BBQ champion, are those things really closed to me just because I'm over 30?  What can I do to make my life MINE and how can I do it in a way that I feel integrity with myself?

On my most recent trip to New York City with my sister and mom to celebrate my mom's 70th birthday, we were walking down Broadway to see a show.  Typically, my sister led the pack - she is from the East Coast now and walks fast and purposeful.  I lagged behind at the back, looking around at all the people.  Still mesmerized by the beauty of all that humanity.  A street musician came up to me - he had dreadlocks and a guitar.  "Hey, hey," he said.  "Hi," I smiled probably shyly - I know I'm supposed to me careful of people in the big city.  

"Come listen to me play."  

"I can't," I said.  "I'm going to a show."  My mom and sister had slowed down, my sister looking back and rolling her eyes - she is like "Here's my Midwest sister talking to someone on the street again."  

The guys looks ahead at them, "Aw, c'mon.  Just for a few minutes."  

"Nah, I can't - I have to go."  

He looks straight into my eyes - "You.  Me.  Another life."  He smiles.  I smile.

"Another life."  I say and walk away.  

Hello, 2018.  We are here.  We have choices before us.  We have lives to lead.  Some paths are closed, and that may be sad, but it is okay.  More paths are open than you may let yourself see.  This is the time to let yourself see them, this is the time to take some risks and make your life your own.  And if you hear the opening music to Saturday Night Live in the background, it's no accident.  That's my dream of the future, turned up really loud.  

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To shift gears - I want to thank my friends and readers for sharing my last blogpost.  I typically have around 400 readers and that blogpost had close to 2000.  As you know, I am working on a book about grief and life and it's kind of a mixed up memoir and self help book and I think it's coming along well and will be interesting and funny and good.  Part of the way I will be able to get a publisher for that book is to demonstrate that I have readership and interest in what I write and your sharing my writing or subscribing to this blog genuinely helps.  

I also have a responsibility to you as readers, which is that this platform of blogger is kind of out of date- I will need to change to a more media savvy platform in the next year sometime and I will do that - I hope you'll bear with me through the changes.  And I will keep you posted on progress.  The beginning of this blogpost today is actually the beginning of one of the chapters of my book, so you continue to get a flavor for what I'm working on.

Thank you all for your continued  support.  A friend recently wrote me with a request for a topic for me to write on - I will do that and I appreciate the feedback or suggestions any time!  

All my best,

Katy