Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Is it possible to raise a family without frequent blow jobs?
Jun 4, 2002 | Dear Cary,
The woman I love is dying. She's in a hospital bed, victim of the worst kind of sick irony. And I want to nestle beside her, hoping that death will carry me off too when it comes to her. After all, she's my best friend, she and her husband. I am probably nothing to her. After all, she loves her husband with a luminous purity, a sentiment equaled only by his love for her. And I'm just the buddy, the guy they eat pizza with once a month.
My grief at her imminent death is as strong as my guilt. How can I, a decent honest fellow, covet another man's wife at the very moment that he is going to lose her forever? But then grief gets the upper hand: When my mother died, the company of my family and the sympathy of my friends kept me sane. When this woman dies, no one will comfort me, and I cannot ask for support. And then guilt rallies: It was bad enough that I imagined countless accidents that would leave my friend quickly and painlessly dead, so I could step in and comfort his mourning wife, slowly making her love me, as she so obviously loves, loved, him.
How can I be there for my friend in the days after he buries his wife? How can I comfort him in good conscience, while I'm wishing he was the one who'd died?
Strange Mourning
Dear Strange,
Pour yourself a glass of cold water and toss it in your face. Someone is dying here. Your guilt and shame and your hateful, adolescent thoughts about your friend are not the issue here. The issue is how to rise to this occasion and acknowledge the meaning of her life, and in doing so perhaps to give some meaning to your own life. What is meaning? Meaning is shape, pattern, harmony, coherence: not chaos, not apathy, cowardice or carelessness.
What could be worse than to recognize when you are older that you loved someone deeply and you had the chance to convey that to her before she died but because you were careless or apathetic or fearful, or because you didn't realize how precious and rare love is and how it must take precedence over pride and fear and selfishness, because you put the wrong things first, you never conveyed that to her and let her die without knowing what place she held in your heart? What could be worse than to discover later in life that your love for her was your one greatest, purest love, and you wasted it because you were afraid how it might look? I'm not saying violate your friend's trust or commit adultery; do not climb into her hospital bed with her. But show her somehow in her last days that you recognize the miraculous in her, that thing in her that no one else recognizes: Show her that you see her as she dreams of being seen.
And then be there for her while she's dying. Don't get between them, but don't abandon her either. And after she's gone, be there for your friend. How do you "be there" for the grieving? You literally, physically, be there. Show up. Bring food. Pick up his laundry. Make runs to the store. Talk to the undertaker if need be. Help visiting family members. Make yourself useful and available.
As to your own grief and guilt: Share it with somebody you trust who doesn't know this couple. And don't beat yourself up about having had some awful thoughts. We all have awful thoughts. It's what we do about them that counts. Handle this with dignity and the rest of your life will be better as a result.
Get Salon in your mailbox!