The Awful Fear of Loss (The Moon, the Crazy Moon, part 2)

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I took a scalpel to an old emotional wound, opening it up in hopes of bringing healing.

I took the risk and asked my friend Doug to help bring clarity to a decades' old misunderstanding between the two of us. When his first reply didn't satisfy my curiosity, I pried further. Then waited. The more time passed with no reply, the more my imagination went to dark places, chiding me for being so foolish to have bared my soul.

My note had left off with:

"I don't know if I've ever confessed to you that I was often rather intentionally contrary with you. In a world where people are constantly battling over their differences, it's weird to say that it was our lack of differences that frightened me. I thought that if I were to admit that I liked too many things that you also liked that I would appear like one of those ditsy, game-playing girls who I had so little respect for... and so, when you said you liked something that I adored, I'd often down-play my admiration... and likewise I was perhaps a bit overboard about those things we disagreed on (food, for example).

"In that way, I guess you could say that good came out of the crumbling apart of our friendship, because I did learn that when you care about someone transparency is important--I should have trusted that the over-all complexity of who we are would be enough to prevent any apparent 'overly-compliant' aspects from being interpreted as fake.

"How stupid of me to BE a fake so as to avoid looking like a fake! Talk about feeding confusion. But have I really learned that lesson if I still find it hard to admit the biggest thing that I never dared to be transparent with you about--the thing that I was so certain would make you not want to be my friend any more? Hmm... I can't claim that I was immature then (as if it's any different from now) if I'm still unwilling to admit 20+ year old feelings for fear of ruining a friendship.

"Yep, I'm still an immature, insecure, fraidy-cat. But all that is self-centered. I don't want to be self-centered. I want to be transparent. I say that all the time, and then I draw my curtains... hesitating because I over-think everything. Could transparency itself be selfish??? What if there are truths I long to speak that others don't want to hear? What if speaking such things destroys the environments others have build for themselves and like?

"I'm sorry to bring you into my madness, [Doug]. These are things I probably just have to figure out for myself--things I shouldn't be burdening anyone else with. Rather than explanation or clarification, all I should really be asking for is prayer--prayer that God would strengthen me according to His word. He is able. I really do believe He is able. I just need Him to help my unbelief. And to know that when my heart melts with heaviness it is safe only as it flows into His hands.

"Thank you for tolerating me after all these years. Someday I'd like to tell you more of the things wiped out by the stroke of a back-space key, things regarding one of my dearest friendships that I keep veiled by a curtain of fear. I know that perfect love casts out fear--why must I be so far from perfection?"

Days went by, then weeks . . . and no reply. I started to take it as confirmation that the friendship was a lot more lop-sided than I'd been willing to admit. I even started imagining that I had been little more than a pawn in a plot of folly and mixed messages, the punchline of a cruel joke. That's why life could go on for Doug, smoothy, comfortably, while I was desperately itching at my scabs.

Today, I got a message from Doug. He said he sent the note because we needed to "keep the dialogue alive." Then, he went on to tell me that about 10 days ago, he went to the doctor because of a mole that had obviously changed. The doctor agreed with his concern and excised it. And today, the pathology report came back as a full-blown melanoma. "The good news," he said, was that "the depth of it was less than one cm--about a third of that." He explained that if it had been deeper, "it would have been serious, with more excision and pulling lymph nodes under the arm and all that."

His good news didn't sound good to me. One-third of a centimeter sounded way too deep, so I looked it up online and learned that anything deeper than a millimeter is of great concern because that is when it's deep enough to reach blood vessels and be spread to other parts of the body. It took a while for me to even be able to write a single line in reply. I was reeling. I couldn't stand the thought of the worst case scenario (which I have already seen play out in the lives of several people close to me.) Most of the people I have known with melanoma haven't survived. And now I was faced with the possibility of loosing someone to whom I couldn't even admit my true feelings for fear of them being taken as "inappropriate."

Finally I managed to ask him to please tell me that he meant to say "mm" instead of "cm." I sent the message, but then I had to get away to a quiet place. Todd had just returned from the store, and the boys kept demanding my attention, so I snuck out to the van in the driveway and hid in the back seat where I returned a call to a dear friend. It was helpful talking it out with her, but I was away from the computer, so I didn't check for Doug's reply until about an hour later. Oh, the relief to see that he had indeed made a typo. He meant "mm" not "cm". That still doesn't guarantee that he's in the clear, but the prognosis is A LOT better.

Needless to say, my chest has done some of those crazy contortions today. Like her mother said in reply to Loretta's declaration that she loved Ronny Cammareri something awful, "Oh God, that's too bad!" and "When you love them, they drive you crazy." (Moonstruck, 1987)

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation." (C.S. Lewis - Four Loves)

The Moon, the Crazy Moon

I felt that pain in my chest today. Not the kind associated with medical maladies, but rather that deep sobbing that may not even make a sound, but it feels like it's capable of turning you inside-out. Was it something Todd said? you may ask. No. Not at all. Todd has hurt me but he has never moved me to tears like this. This was the rare tug--the pull of true loss. I felt it at my sister's funeral, and I felt it when I was driving home after Charlie and I split up, while his child was still growing inside my womb.

What would bring about such internal contortion? Nothing Todd could say or do. I'm growing immune to his prodding. I think that comment he made a few weeks ago, "I didn't say 'we,'" in reference to moving back to the midwest, coupled with his accusation the following day that I had intentionally fainted at our wedding to get out of saying the vows combined to form the last straw. He can tick me off or annoy me... but really move me? Not so much.

What was it, then? I guess you could call it another silly self-therapy move. I wonder if I could get my own show on the DIY network.

I was reading excerpts from the book, Living with the Passive-Aggressive Man, and I started to feel really paranoid. I ran from room to room, closing the blinds on the windows and making sure the doors were locked, disassembled every smoke detector and heating vent to be sure there weren't any hidden cameras, dissected the phones in search of bugs, and peered into each closet (and the refrigerator) looking for spies. How could Scott Wetzler, Ph. D. know so much about what goes on in our house without the assistance of surveillance technology? What I read planted a tiny suspicion in my head... the thought that the problem between Todd and me is not completely about me being "crazy and impossible to talk to." Maybe I wasn't just imagining the mind game olympics that have been leaving me confused and feeling emotionally spent.

But then I went back to the log-eye thing.

Don't think of yourself more highly than you ought, I told myself. Todd's not the only one who has accused you of being an awful person, Bridget. Maybe it's true.

My mind went back more than a couple decades to that fateful, pivotal day when Doug told me everything that was wrong with me in one sitting. He didn't want to spend time with me anymore. It was over. Every time I walked by his best friend on campus, I'd hear him mutter the words, "hateful" or "Jezebel." Accusations like that don't just spring out of thin air, do they? Way back when this was happening, I confronted Doug's friend, asking him why he called me those things. All I was ever able to get out of him was that I had hurt Doug. When I tried to get him to tell me how, all he would say was, "at least you weren't married."

All of these years, that whole series of events has been confusing to me. I still don't know what happened. I still don't know what I did to hurt Doug. I've suspected that he liked me as more than a friend and he took my lack of response to his hints as a rejection, but I've never confirmed that. As those of you who have been following this blog know, Doug and I have been reconciled for quite a while. We're actually good friends now. But I still never figured out what went wrong way back then. He chalks it up to "we were young... naive... immature..." That's never really been enough clarity for me, but you can only dig so much when the others involved are pouring concrete and constructing buildings on the spot in question. I've let it go, wanting to know more every time one of my kids comes to me seeking advice on similar situations of the heart, but knowing that the only way to find out would be to come right out and ask him... which I still guess I fear might scare him away (I may also be a little afraid of what a blow it would be to my self esteem if I were to find out after all these years that he never did like me as anything more than just a friend, and that I was delusional to think that that was what had hurt him.)

Anyway, I finally did it yesterday. I finally broke down and told him that I really need to know what it was that I did, didn't do, said, or didn't say that caused him such great hurt that he didn't want to be around me anymore back then. What did I think knowing would accomplish after all these years? I may not have really known when I sent the message, but it couldn't be un-sent. As the day went by, I came to realize that it was, at least in part, self-sabotage--fishing for ammunition to use against myself. Perhaps he would raise accusations that would collude with what Todd says about me, confirming that I really am an awful person. You see, on the flip side of wondering how it was that I hurt Doug, part of me has always wondered IF I really hurt him... or if it was really just part of a game. He had spent time with me when he didn't have anyone else to spend time with, and then, when our mutual "friend" who was interested in dating him came into the picture, he tired of me, and the "you hurt me" story was just a convenient way to get rid of me. For all I know, that's just as likely to be true as the he had a crush on me delusion.

He did write back. And what he said didn't bring any more clarity.

"i appreciate the fact that you're trying to work through some really aweful pieces of our mutual past. however, i honestly can't remember any feelings about you that would have caused me to react to you in the way you described.

"here is my conclusion: like many people, i was a very confused and certainly a very insecure person. as we've discussed, i had my own issues with [our mutual friends]. i'm sure this included trying to impress them to the point of trying to make myself look like someone i wasn't--to the extent of acting out the immense insecurity that still haunts me to this day.

"knowing [the guy who called me "hateful"] as i did, he (like me) was often sarcastic and enjoyed the folly of mixed messages. i honestly cannot make any connection between you and the biblical jezebel in my wildest accounts and interpretation of what was going on back then. everything seemed to be about being funny, getting the laughs, and actually feeding each other in ways that were never conducive to real friendship or mutual understanding. the reality is, if we had the tools, we didn't apply them to all relationships to make them what they needed to be. rather, we did what we needed to do to make certain relationships work.

"if you were to see [those old mutual friends] right now, you wouldn't recognize them. they both have grown into truly godly, really terrific people, and the stuff we knew 26-plus years ago is no longer part of who they are. in fact, if we were to broach it, they, too, would likely be embarrassed and even repentent. i suspect that this would be the necessary connector for you: knowing that we all were young and immature, which doesn't necessarily cover over the multitude of sins, but helps to bring understanding for what we may continue to feel.

"here's a start. i'm happy to keep this going in processing through with you."

And I did reply to that message, but I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of anything that will bring any more clarity at all. It was while I was writing that reply that my chest did the contorting on me--while I was imagining all the horrible truths that could come out if I kept digging.

What will I do if he does at some point reveal to me that my suspicions of our friendship having always been a whole lot more lop-sided than I was willing to admit are true? I suspect it will be more of those deep chest contortions... hurting something awful... but it will be worth it to have the truth, right?

On another note, to celebrate my anniversary (a day late and alone) I watched a movie called Ira and Abby. It's a pretty cynical look at marriage, and therapy . . . How fitting!

Love this exchange:

Abby: Do you have a girlfriend?

Ira: No, I have a fear of perishables.

For some reason, as soon as it finished, I thought of the lines about marriage in Moonstruck:

Ma: Do you love him, Loretta?

Loretta: Ma, I love him awful.

Ma: Oh God, that's too bad.

It's kind of a relief that I don't love Todd awful. It's kind of a comfort to be numbed to that pain in the chest.