It's All In The Past .......

Yesterday I came face-to-face with a portion of my past in the form of an ex who had expressed a desire to come visit recently. This hadn’t been the first attempt. In fact it was probably more like the third or fourth in as many months, but up until now I had managed to evade confrontation. However, this past week his younger brother passed away due to an inoperable brain tumor, and when he called to tell me the news, he was so broke up he could barely speak.

With me having lost my own brother going on ten years ago, this news sent a message to my heart telling me it was ‘time’. Mike and I had what could only be described as a love/hate relationship almost from the start, but he had managed to pick me up off the floor in the months following my divorce from my children’s father by somehow convincing me I was ‘better’ than the person I’d let myself become. As such I had always felt a strong sense of loyalty to him that in the midst of our ongoing struggles, was often difficult to explain to anyone else.

He is heavily connected to the music industry out of Nashville and in this regard traveled extensively and suffered from all the same vices so many entertainers succumb to once famous. I, however, remained in Nashville working for a design firm that catered to high-end retail stores such as Polo and Tommy Hilfiger as well as the golf industry nationwide and abroad. Months would pass without us seeing one another, and stories from the road failed to entertain me in the same way it did him. Jealousy reared its ugly head, and we fought, and we left each other at least a dozen times only to reunite and do it all over again. It wasn’t until I married him on a whim during a trip to the Smoky Mountains that I realized five days later we were finished, and I surrendered to yet another painful break-up.

But somewhere along the way we managed to figure out we could still remain friends despite the fact we had made a dreadful couple. We’d call each other on birthdays and during the holidays, and shoot the breeze over the telephone a couple other times a year, but in the past couple of years, life took a devastating downward turn for Mike as he lost his mother, stepmother – who had become a second mother figure – his sister, a stepbrother and stepsister, his father, his beloved dog and finally last week his remaining brother. This past Thanksgiving, he barely survived an assault by a furloughed prisoner in Oklahoma City during which he was stabbed multiple times landing him in an ICU in a coma for over three weeks. When he was admitted, following the first of three surgeries, his daughter, Michelle, was told they gave him a 40% chance of survival, but survive he did.

So after all of this, how could I tell him “no” when he said he needed to see me? It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see him, it was just the buffer distance created enabled me to remain his friend without his assuming we could once again morph into something greater. Text messages since last fall had told me on numerous occasions I was the only woman he’d ever loved and that it had always been “me”. Then I would be forced to tell him ours was a tragically bad relationship, and although I held no ill-will or resentment towards him, I was not prepared to travel down that same road again. Consequently feelings would be hurt and weeks would pass before he popped up on my radar.

Yesterday, as I braced myself for a visit that could go any number of possible ways, I reminded myself of George Santayana’s famous quote ….. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and with my resolve firmly in place, I answered the door. He looked good. He was thinner and fitter than I could ever remember him having been before. He had a broad smile on his face and instantly pulled me into him to give me a hug. Following the storms of the previous day, it was so picture perfect outside, we took a bottle of wine down to Carpenter Dam and sat in his truck with the windows down while we re-hashed our glory days. I honestly can’t remember the last time I laughed so much or allowed myself to cry in front of another human being, but it was good.

I’m not a big fan of the word ‘closure’ …. perhaps because I’ve never really been able to achieve it. Whether someone dies or for other reasons decides to goes their own way, once they have been an integral part of your life, they leave an indelible print upon your soul, and because they are no longer with you doesn’t mean they didn’t have an impact on your life that somehow changed you. The memories you attach to that person remain intact, and short of catastrophic brain injury, dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, they will always be a part of you. Therefore, instead of seeking some unattainable closure, I find it best to release the pain while holding on to all that was good as a means to fill and replenish your emotional bank account, so that on dark and stressful days you still have the necessary reserves from which to draw that can make you feel better about life even when it’s far less than perfect.

Another famous quote by Mr. Santayana is, “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” and while he may have been speaking in a more literal sense this is also true for each of us. The effort to maintain some sense of balance and integrity while simultaneously struggling to make something of your life that makes sense is an ongoing battle at best. It’s easy to get lost and to forget who you are, much less why you’re trying so hard, and unfortunately it’s a war that will rage on until the day you die. It’s only by letting go of the past while keeping focused on the future do any of us ever hope to arrive at our destination, but I think it’s still okay to sometimes go up in the attic and open our hope chests to see what we’ve carefully placed inside. On some days memories are all we have, and on those days oftentimes it’s all we need.