I talk about the end of my last romantic relationship like a death.  It was essentially like knowing someone really special in your life has a month to live and then seeing them disappear in a moment, and that felt like a small (or not so small) death to me.

We knew about a month before that the unsustainable and subtly destructive cycles of conflict happening around but not between us every few weeks were only going to get worse for everyone.  We also knew that we were out of ideas for trying to make anything better.  But given the predictable cadence, we agreed we had about one more month and we should enjoy it.  And right on schedule, with some help from a very bad decision on his part, death set in as predicted.  We had a few hours to talk about it, cry about it, and fall asleep sad and exhausted in a pile.  I woke up late for an appointment, left him sleeping, hoping I’d get back to say goodbye, and then got stuck in a traffic jam – and never saw him again.  Just like a death.  There was one short, failed conversation after that, followed quickly by a series of 3am texts (not from him) sent as a passive aggressive warning. And that was that.

Losing something quickly and without conflict or struggle – losing it while it itself is thriving, but can’t survive for circumstantial reasons – kind of entombs the experience in a saintly martyrdom.  It gets frozen in a perfect state, right where it stopped.

This makes death the right model for the grief of it.  There’s no one to blame.  There’s nothing to be done about it.  You just embrace how lucky you are to have had the amazing gift of the time you got and then you do your very best to let it go as graciously as you can, with interspersed fits of anger, entitlement, regret, self-recrimination, and other tiring things that your friends are wise and compassionate enough to shepherd you through.

It doesn’t hurt all the time now.  It’s ok.  I don’t think about it every minute.  It doesn’t hit me in the gut while I am in the middle of a sentence, standing at a whiteboard in a conference room with a bunch of people.  It lingers softly and comes in sad, beautiful waves, fading while I try to hold on to the little bits before they go too far.

And things around me keep going.  And that just seems impossible.  First, I washed the last sheets and towels, probably (definitely) having waited too long.  The soap ran out and got replaced.  The toothbrushes retired.  The songs in the playlists for my exercise classes cycled through, one by one dropping off until they are all new again.

Then, just now, I was in the bath, cleaning up my toenails and noticed the left big one, which had been whacked months ago, then turned black and fell off on one side, disgusting, sloppy polish trying to hide its grossness for so long as we went about our lives, was totally normal again.  It made me sad.  I was sad that it healed and moved on without me.  I wanted it to stay broken and not remind me that life is moving forward each day, fading the whole thing farther and farther into the background.  It almost made me angry – “How dare you, you fucking toenail!  Show a little respect and stay still for a minute.  I’m not ready for this time to pass yet…”

But there it is, all normal again.  I went down and got a new color of polish.  It’s called “blanc” and it is just white. Just nothing.  Maybe “blanc” can hold the space just a little longer…