Dear Sars:

Normally I would content myself with quiet lurking, but the letter from Lise, your response to her, and subsequent letters from Vine readers have prompted me to weigh in here.

Frankly, you certainly don’t need me to defend you and your position. You are eloquent and thoughtful in your responses to all the letters you receive.I am contributing my opinion because I want you to know that there are some of us out here who have experienced losses who are actually going quietly about our lives and coping rather well.

I have had two miscarriages and I have also lost a baby, less than three weeks old, who was born two months prematurely.I’m not mentioning this to get pity or sympathy.I simply mention it so that people can’t accuse me of not understanding.I understand grief and loss all too well.However, I also know the unbounded happiness of having two healthy children, a strong family, a loving husband, and good health. There comes a time when you have to realize that life goes on.The world isn’t going to wait around for you to get your act together, and, really, people aren’t going to make it easy for you, either.I think some of the insensitive things that people say can cause a “two steps backward” phenomenon sometimes.But guess what?Being defensive and overly sensitive is not helping.Sometimes grace under pressure is the only thing you are left with.

I think it is to Lise’s credit that not once in her letter did she mention that her mother’s behaviour was causing her and her sister to feel like a big ol’ pile of chopped liver.I was glad that you had mentioned it in your response to “Hawaii.”Lise’s concern seems to be solely for her mother’s well-being, which is remarkable and wonderful in someone so young.Clearly her mother has done something right over the years to have ended up with such a mature, thoughtful daughter.The fact remains, Lise’s maturity notwithstanding, that Lise and her sister are still children.Her mother, presumably, is an adult.The thing is, I’m discovering, is that even if we grown-ups don’t feel like being grown-ups, we have to act like we are.Sometimes this means bucking up and carrying on, putting one foot in front of the other, and smiling though our heart is breaking.

How’s that for a long sentence full of clichés?I guess my final point is that you have to let yourself heal.One of the things my husband and I discovered after the loss of our little guy was that in some ways we felt that being happy was a betrayal of his memory.Once we realized that feeling guilty about being happy was completely bizarre, life started to turn around, little by little.

The other conclusion that I have come to over the years is that our memories are private, beautiful, and, I suppose you could say, sacred. To try to make others understand or share our feelings is impossible, and just leads to more upset for us.

Just a nickel’s worth of rambling.I hope I don’t sound judgmental.

I enjoy your writing immensely.Keep up the good work.Might I add, I’m glad you and the kitties are safe.

Cheers,
C

Thanks for writing, C, and for the nice things you say about the site.I’m sorry about your son, but it’s good to hear that you’ve learned to live with the loss.

Dear Sars,

My friend has been going through some problems, and I was wondering if you could offer her some advice.

A few years ago, she (let’s call her “Natalie”) began seeing a friend of her brother’s (let’s call him Fred). They had a fairly typical teenage relationship, right up until the point where she got pregnant. She decided to keep the baby, and he seemed to be very supportive of the decision. After the child was born, however, Fred seemed to become more withdrawn and depressed, and soon they broke up and Natalie gained sole custody of the child. Fred still had a fairly active role in his child’s life, though, as he lives very close to Natalie, although he always seemed to treat looking after his child by himself as a chore. A good example of this is that he would always harass Natalie to return home as soon as possible when she’d leave him with their child, on the odd occasion that she could convince him to actually bother doing it. To me, it always seemed like he wasn’t over her, and couldn’t deal with her having her own life.

Things were getting worse until the child was diagnosed with diabetes and almost died. This event seemed to vastly change Fred’s attitude toward his parental duties, and he began to spend more and more time looking after the baby and helping Natalie out.

However, things have changed again. He’s recently begun to spend all of his time at her place, saying that she’s the only person who understands him, and has tried to get back together with her many times, even though she has told him flat out that it will never happen. He’s also dropped out of the college course that he was taking, doesn’t have a job, and if anyone says anything to him, he just freaks and tells them to stop putting so much pressure on him. So basically he has taken to lying around Natalie’s house all day doing nothing.

To make matters worse, he tells her that she’s the only reason that he has to keep living, and constantly tells her that he wants to die and acts very depressed.At times he’ll enter a deep funk, and when she asks him what’s wrong, he’ll just tell her that she should know.

This behaviour really got out of hand one day very recently when Fred pulled the very mature act of closing his eyes and covering his ears when Natalie tried to talk to him.She snapped, and basically told him to get out if he was going to act that way in her house.After he yelled back at her, basically insinuating that it was all her fault, he stormed out of her house.For some reason he must have thought she was going to let him back in, but when she told him to go home, and went to lock the door, he stormed back in in a daze of anger and hit her.

She swears that he didn’t do it with a closed fist, and that it wasn’t hard, when she told me about it (basically because I was freaking out at this point).She also says that she doesn’t want to make a big deal about it, because she doesn’t want her child to grow up without his father.Fred, of course, has been really nice to her in the few days since this has happened.She also is being made to feel guilty by his constant threats of suicide that have been happening for a few months prior to this event, and she even rings his house up to 10 times in a row to make sure that he’s okay every morning.She knows that this may be giving him the wrong idea, but with him saying that she’s the only thing keeping him alive, she feels that she has no other alternative to keep things as they are.

So basically, I’m wondering if you have any opinions about what she can do.She’s tried to talk him into counselling, but he always puts on a front when he’s around other people, to the extent that when they were at their mandatory counselling sessions when their child was in hospital, they were told that they seemed very well adjusted and were coping extremely well.She wants to speak to someone herself, but she’s not sure about how much she can say to one without the counsellor legally having to take some form of action.Like I said before, she wants to help him, and the last thing that she wants to do is have her child grow up without his father.I really have no idea how I can help her, and am worried that things are only going to get worse from here.Thanks in advance for any advice you can think of and keep up the great work with the site.

Worried Friend

Dear Worried,

Fred is manipulative, shiftless, and violent.Why the hell Natalie would want that kind of man as a father figure for her child is completely beyond me.

You must make Natalie see that Fred is no good.Fred cannot — will not — take responsibility for his actions.Fred cannot — will not — accept the reality of their break-up.Fred cannot — will not — control his anger.And therefore, Fred cannot and will not see Natalie or his child until he agrees to get some goddamn counseling, get a goddamn job like every other goddamn adult, get over his goddamn obsession with Natalie, and get a goddamn grip on his lazy fucked-up self.Fred is crazy.Fred is dangerous.Fred is going to set a horrible example for their child, both in his own behavior and in Natalie’s co-dependent responses to it.You have to get that through to Natalie — now, today.

I don’t doubt that Fred has a legitimate problem with depression, but if he really wanted to kill himself, he’d have done it by now, so let him soak in it.He’s beyond Natalie’s help.Natalie needs to help herself and her baby, and she can best do that by changing the locks and telling Fred to fuck off — via restraining order, if that’s what it takes — until he gets his shit together.

Biology is not destiny, and Fred is not a father.Fred is an immature asswipe.Natalie might think she needs him, but she doesn’t need him — she needs everything but him.Tell her so.

Dear Sars,

Three years ago, I was going to college in a different state, and dating a man five years older then me.We got along brilliantly, like we were both cut from the same mold.He liked me very much, and wanted to be more serious about our relationship than my giddy little college self could handle.His whole family welcomed me in, thinking I was the One, but I simply wasn’t ready, and sweet guy that he was, he graciously let me go so I could have my wings and my “college experience.”

What I didn’t know until a few months later was that I had hurt him more then he first let on.He had fallen in love with me and I hadn’t realized it, or maybe I had chosen to not realize it, I don’t know.I was just having fun, and in my youth I saw him as more of a best friend then someone I could spend the rest of my life with. We had kind of a delicate friendship until I moved back to my home state a few months later.

I wanted really badly to keep in touch, but after he didn’t write back to, like, five of my emails, I figured he had either forgotten about me or wanted nothing to do with me.About eight monthsafter I had moved, a mutual friend of ours told me she had run into him, and he had basically told her that he couldn’t stop thinking about me.I still didn’t hear from him in the months that followed, though, and the one last time I tried to email him, it turned out his address no longer existed.

Well, it’s been about a year and a half since I last saw him, and — you knew this was coming — I totally still have feelings for him.Horrible timing.I’ve never connected with anyone the way we connected, and I’m constantly wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t been so scared to get serious.I’ve dated a couple of people since, but my heart always goes back to him.Part of me thinks I am in love with him, but the other part is to freaked out to let myself believe it, because I just feel like it’s too late now, and why should I get a second chance.

So, I finally emailed our mutual friend a couple months ago and got his email address.I wrote him a friendly “how’s life” letter, trying to emphasize that I missed him a lot without giving myself away (“MARRY ME!!”).He wrote me back a warm and affectionate letter, even saying how it would be great to see each other if we were ever in each other’s area.I was pretty excited at first, but then he didn’t write back to my second or third email, and now it’s been a few months and I still haven’t heard from him.

Okay, so I think there are three possible reasons why:

a)He still has feelings for me, but because I hurt him the first time around, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.

b)He hates me ’cause I hurt him, he no longer has feelings for me, and he wants nothing to do with me.

c)He has totally moved on, there’s someone new in his life who is ready for what I wasn’t, and he sees me as a friend from the past who keeps bugging him with these emails.

I’m not sure what to do; my heart says to just go for it, write him and tell him I still care about him, and if he writes me back telling me to lay off, at least I tried.But then my mind says I need to just forget about him and move on, if it had been meant to be it would have worked out, and he obviously doesn’t want anything to do with me now.I feel like I don’t deserve the first option ’cause I’m the one who broke his heart in the first place, but then the second option sucks, man, ’cause I’ve never met anyone like him.

What do you think, Sars?Maybe it all sounds girly and whiny; it’s just that I can’t bring myself to forget about him, and it’s driving me crazy.

Tardy And Wishful

Dear Tardy,

I think you should send him a letter — but I think that, before you do, you need to think about why you want to do that.Make sure it’s not because you don’t have anything else going on right now.Remind yourself why you connected with him in the first place…and why you disconnected from him.Clarify with yourself that this isn’t just misplaced nostalgia or a symptom of something else, some other dissatisfaction, in your life.Think about what might happen if he still loves you and the two of you get back together.Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean to talk you out of this.But I’ve done it, and I did it for the wrong reasons, and I got the guy back, but it didn’t work out because I didn’t get honest with myself about it first.The movie doesn’t fade to black with you kissing; that’s only the beginning of the story, if it happens, so think ahead.

And you should prepare yourself for bad news.You don’t have to expect it.Just…prepare yourself for it.A lot of time has passed.He’s kind of unresponsive.Your telling him point-blank that you still have feelings for him might change that, of course…but it might not.He might have turned the corner on this thing.Be ready for that.

Take a day or two to think it over.If you still feel the same way, and you can handle the possibility of a non-happy ending, write the letter (an actual letter, not an email).Tell him everything you’ve just told me.Drop it in the mail, and see what happens.Otherwise, you’ll never know, and I think it’s better to know in this case.

[10/3/01]

Share!