Mourning

In my life, the death of a relationship has generally been a lot like the death of a loved-one. It's just a lot worse.

When Pépère died, each day I would feel a horrible weight of dread, of sadness, of loss. It made me wonder how would I ever get through a day with knowledge that he wasn't in the world somewhere for me, to love me no matter what I did.

Pépère didn't see me as someone born with the original sin of being born to divorced parents. To him, I wasn't one of those "god-damned three kids" whose father ran away. I was his grandson. I wasn't an unfortunate reminder, a cause for screaming and fighting every night, a reason why things sucked, an excuse for "Dad" to be pissed-off.

I didn't have to belong to triple A. I had Pépère. He was always there with free road-side assistance. As a last resort, he could always tie a rope or chain to the bumper and tow the broken-down car home.

But while I got over the death of my grandfather, I never held out hope he would be coming back from the dead. At first I hated myself for learning how to get along without him, for catching myself when I realized that I hadn't throught of him in a week.

But gradually I came to understand that our relationship hadn't changed, only the way we spent time together had changed. Pépère was still always around but he become someone I spoke to in my heart. I still knew how he felt towards me, that the way we felt towards each other hadn't changed and wouldn't.

The death of a relationship with a woman was much worse. Two of the people who made up the relationship are still around, living and breathing. It's the third person in the relationship, the "we", that dies. It's the dreams, the potential future, the belonging that die.

The mourning is more tortuous because of the chance that something might change, the chance that the wound can be healed; what was rendered made whole. It takes the right tools to handle that kind of job; to staunch the bleeding and cauterize that wound.

Each relationship is an escape from loneliness; the chance for new life. There is an unbounded joy in the discovery that someone sees worth in me. As life wears on, that elation is tempered by disappointment, the dread that someone will learn the truth about me,all the way back to the roots of my inequity. They'll learn who the "real me" is and the facade will become harder to maintain and it's difficult to remember what spin of the truth was told to whom.