Getting over it

(I'm posting this one because it looks as though several people on my flist could use it. I'm doing fine right now, thanks.)

There are two links here, and they're related only because they both touch on the way a relationship can change after it's over.

The first is this review of a book called Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adults Life--For the Better.

Death Benefits demonstrates through powerful stories (including the author's own revelatory experience) how parent loss is the most potent catalyst for change in middle age and can actually offer us our last, best chance to become our truest, deepest selves. Safer challenges the conventional wisdom that fundamental change is only for the young; and that loss must simply be endured or overcome.

I probably ought to get this one, but I don't really need to: I can easily believe it. Sometimes you need a whack on the side of the head with a very big cluestick, and that's about the biggest one you can get. That cancer screening you've been putting off? Do it now.

 

The second is a little more problematic: The Emotions of Grief During A Breakup (via Wikipedia). In particular,

When the person is alive and there was a breakup, this is often when people will try to open up communications with the ex. Recognize that the urge to search is part of the grieving process and you should not act on it. When you are pining and searching, you are in a temporary state and anything you say now can and will be held against you at a later date.

(Emphasis mine) This is probably good advice, sometimes. If you want or need to make a clean break of it, if there's pain or anger or hatred on one side or the other, if you've broken up before and can't seem to stay away from one another, yeah: I can see it.

But if the objective is to stay friends, to cool a too-intense relationship down to a level that you're both comfortable with, it's probably best to keep talking. In many cases, you'll both be grieving, though perhaps to different degrees. Help one another work through it. As friends.

(I'll note as an aside that you'll need to give one another space and time. Call or IM when you have news, or to congratulate your friend when they post happy news in their LJ. Not every day. Maybe not even every week. Drop back to email, perhaps, and the occasional LJ comment. Don't go for dinner and a movie -- that's really courting disaster. Meet for lunch on a weekday when you both have things to get back to at 1:00 sharp.)

As a friend, realize that you want your friend to be happy. Not with you as their lover, apparently, but happy. Stay interested in their life. Help one another through it, as best you can. Be glad you're still friends.

 

(Added 17:00) Let me just restate something from the last post on grieving: "getting over" your loss does not mean "forgetting about it". Your goal is to come to terms with it, whatever those terms happen to be; to "get over it" in the sense of getting over a challenging obstacle, so that it's safely behind you and doesn't keep getting in the way of your life.

...and what am I doing in this handbasket?

It occurred to me rather suddenly last night that here I am, a 61-year-old, notoriously reclusive and socially inept computer nerd, attempting to dispense avuncular advice on relationships, marriage, and psychology over the internet. And in person, I might add.

This strikes me as highly improbable, totally out of character, mildly amusing, and more than a little mind-boggling. I feel a little as though, after many years of playing an assortment of jesters and other fools, I have finally moved up to playing Polonius.

Uncle Jack's obituary

Jacob Robbins; NIH Scientist Known for Thyroid Research (From The Washington Post, May 16, 2008.)

Jacob Robbins first set foot on the eighth floor of the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health in 1954. Claiming one of only two working labs available to him in the year-old hospital, he immediately launched what would become groundbreaking work on the function of the thyroid and the treatment of thyroid cancer, particularly cancer caused by exposure to radioactivity.

On May 12, Dr. Robbins died of cardiac arrest -- at the Clinical Center, not far from where his NIH work had begun 54 years earlier. He was 85.

"He died surrounded by the work he treasured," said Griffin P. Rodgers, director of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, or NIDDK.

I'll miss him.