Grief Anniversary

"May the Lord bless you and take care of you.
May the Lord be kind and gracious to you.
May the Lord look on you with favor and give you peace."
~Numbers 6:24-26

One of the defining dates on my life calendar is 8-26-2013, the loss of my best friendship.  I have written more than enough to fill a book over the past few months, the vast majority of which will remain between me and God.  On this anniversary, my goal is to honor our good memories, validate the depth of this loss, and share some hopeful thoughts and lessons God is teaching me... 

• Ecclesiastes 3:11 says God has planted eternity in the human heart.  We were created for eternal relationships, so our souls don't know how to process endings very well.  When you lose someone you love deeply, I believe you have the ability to grow around that grief, but your heart will always miss them and feel tender there. 
• We were best friends for several years.  She was my main confidant, my first call in any crisis, the friend I knew most deeply, the person who knew me best, and the friend I felt most at home with.  Her friendship, support, and ability to see things many others overlooked in me has changed me for the better in several ways.
• I have no doubt this was a difficult loss for her, as well.  The saddest part of this whole thing for me is knowing it could've been great if she had only chosen love over fear.  Instead, our friendship ended on something more like this scene.
• We were both walking new ground and facing deep brokenness when we met in 2007, and this friendship became a life raft through that storm... I cannot overemphasize how important she was to me in that season.  No matter how everyone else views this or thinks I should feel here, this ending is *not* a small loss to me.  I'm wholly incapable of seeing it that way, and there is no need to pretend otherwise.  So I'm holding space for my grief and honoring those emotions, especially on this day.
• I'm grateful my counselor reminded me that no relationship is ever 100% perfect or 100% toxic, and it is normal and okay to miss the things that were special and meaningful to you, even if there was dysfunction and it ended poorly.  I miss all the good things about her and our friendship, and there were many of them!
• As C.S. Lewis put it, "To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken."  Knowing everything I know now, I am still incredibly thankful we reconnected...
• Looking back, God timed this perfectly.  I love that we added two more Christmas seasons to our friendship, and I was honored to be there for her as a dependable confidant and source of encouragement through all of 2020, a terribly difficult pandemic year that included a lot of loss and major changes for her and her family.  She needed the support of a good friend more than usual, and it was my genuine privilege to be that person for her.  Walking with her through that season also served to soften my own heart and remove any lingering resentment or insecurity that I'd been holding.  When you only see and hear about the highlights of someone's life for years, it can be easy to view them through a false narrative and view your own life as inferior.  Being closer again fully re-humanized her and reminded me that we all have struggles and hard seasons, and we all have our strengths and reasons to be grateful. 
  
• My time, energy, and love are precious, and I want to spend them with people who feel delight rather than dread or shame at the thought of getting together.
• There were hard conversations with friends who have my best interest at heart, and there were red flags in my spirit that I pushed aside for too long here.  The imbalanced, dysfunctional dynamic was becoming clear to me for several months before I gently spoke up for myself.
  
• In spite of the sting of ongoing rejection, it is truly better to know than to wonder. 
• Hurting people hurt people, but healing people help others to heal.  My strong desire is to be in the latter group, so I have taken the responsibility for pursuing my own healing and wholeness very seriously this year!
• When we allow ourselves to honor and feel the intense grief emotions, it actually deepens our capacity to feel vibrant joy and rich gratitude!  I know that to be true from experience.  There is grief and gratitude, sorrow and celebration all mingled together here... I feel a deep awareness that God is present and life is a priceless gift, even if it doesn't look exactly the way I had hoped in this season. ❤
• I've been cautiously asked more than once by sincere friends whether there was ever a romantic element to this friendship... which makes me think others may have also wondered but been afraid to ask.  So for what it's worth, please allow me to publicly clarify that there was not.  There were many complicating factors, but that was absolutely never one of them, to the very best of my knowledge/personal perspective.  The depth of this grief is purely based on my heart for relationships and us getting stuck in the impossibly-painful anxious/avoidant trap.
• I understand why this needed to end, and it really is over now. But I sincerely care about her, and I no longer feel any unfair pressure to feign strength by pretending otherwise.  I love and respect myself, and I love and respect her.  They are not antithetical.  I want God's best for her and her family, and I hope she finds healing and feels loved and lovable and enjoys her life moving forward!
• For any readers dealing with their own grief and loss, I’ll tell you some of what I’ve told myself:
• It is 100% okay if you need to walk away from someone you love because you are continually getting hurt or being mistreated.  You can love and miss someone every day, but still choose to say goodbye to them.  
• Have grace for yourself and move at your own pace as you heal.   
• Don't feel ashamed of your God-given longing for connection - it's a beautiful gift that can bring us closer to Jesus.  
• Guard your heart by loving God more deeply than you love anyone else. ❤
  
• Have grace for others, too.  Your friends and family may not always know the best way to help, but they care and love you, so ask for specific support and prayer... be vocal and communicate what you need.
• God CARES and He is close to the brokenhearted.  You are never completely alone with any of your quiet tears and fears, confusion and heartache, even in the darkest moments of mourning.  You are always seen; God is always present; and He understands the true extent of your loss in a way no one else really can.  
• It's a muddy path forward, but you are making imperfect progress.  There is more joy, hope, and light ahead.  God still has a good plan for your future... so keep the faith and keep pressing forward, one brave step at a time.

I want to guard my heart from further damage, but I also want to acknowledge and validate this massive part of my life story.  So I am choosing not to throw the good things out with the bad, not to minimize everything this friendship has meant to me.  I'm publishing this final post and deliberately keeping a few photos of her up in my home for that very reason... I want to honor the major role Malori has played in my life, and those pictures help me to keep a soft heart toward her, which is deeply important to me. ❤

It's been a long day without you, my friend,

And I'll tell you all about it when I see you again.

We've come a long way from where we began.

Oh, I'll tell you all about it when I see you again.

To know what I'd trade for one more day to have them

To know what it takes to live my life without them

I could tell you all the details of who I am, but then again

To know me, you would have to know my friend.

~Lauren Daigle

Part of me will always wish things were different here, “on earth, as it will be in heaven.”  But whenever she comes to mind, I will pray the blessings verse at the very top of this post over her and her family.  And I will guard my heart and reframe my hope for this connection in light of eternity and the full restoration Jesus promises us there.  Because someday, all of our inner brokenness and messy, traumatic memories and old scars and unyielding walls, along with any other lies and divisive work of our spiritual enemy will be healed or removed, and only the love of Christ will stand between us!  That promise of "beauty for ashes" is really hopeful and comforting to me. ❤

Words often fail to capture what is most sacred to us.  (Sometimes only God understands the full magnitude of our losses.)  After working through several drafts of this post over the past three months, I can assure you that what you're seeing here is actually the condensed version, and I am unlikely to blog about this after today.  It's time to draw a line and keep moving forward, protecting my time and emotional energy. ❤

"For everything there is a season,
a time appointed for every activity under heaven...
Everything God has done will endure forever:
Nothing can be added to it or taken from it.
God has done all this so that we will worship Him."
~Ecclesiastes 3:1,14

Less than a month into our reconnection, in the process of "catching up" on her Facebook posts and photos, I had a very shaky, unexpected, and intense panic attack... an acute physical reaction to unhealed past trauma and reopened wounds.  It was a weird combination of suppressed sadness, anger, grief, and fear all bubbling up at once.  Following that very sleepless night, I cried a few times a day for about three weeks straight - sometimes in my office, sometimes at home - unable to pull it together, feeling overwhelmed and flooded with delayed grief emotions over all the big events and daily details we'd missed in each other's lives... (paired with stress about alienating my existing friends, many of whom were understandably concerned by the news of this reconnection).  My nervous system was fully activated and on edge, and I needed God's help to calm and quiet my heart.  I am so thankful that season was brief, because it was mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausting.  My grief was shrouded by anger and shame in 2013, but somehow, our renewed friendship allowed me to feel the full weight of the sadness beneath all of that time apart... something I needed to FEEL and finally process in order to move through it and be freed up to move forward.

She expressed sincere remorse for cutting me out and deep gratitude for having me back in her life, so I had good reason to hope things would be different this time.  I'm convinced that it was never malicious, but her kind words and distant actions were glaringly out of alignment.  There was a lot of internal wrestling on my end over what that push/pull dynamic meant and when and how to address it.  And there were deeply rooted communication issues that I was unable to fix singlehandedly...

Allllll of that to say:  From 2007 to 2021, our friendship lasted 7 years and 12 days in total, both Biblically-significant numbers that symbolize completion and divine authority.  Knowing that helps me to fully trust that God is closing this door and there is no going back for round three.  Our earthly season of friendship is over, and I already have more God-given peace about this ending than I have felt in years.  I gave it everything I possibly could, and knowing that helps too.  My heart has shifted in some really healthy ways over the past year, and God has freed me to move forward now with more relational clarity and hope than I have felt in 15+ years...

When everyone else understandably forgets about this grief, God remembers.  He sees every tear I have cried, and He is protective over my heart.  I have felt His love more tangibly in this season, and I am inexpressibly thankful for His faithfulness!  #ThankfulThursday

I am also thankful for the extra support and love I have received from my friends and family through both rounds of this loss.  Thank you for being here today and witnessing this grief anniversary alongside me.  My sadness over this loss also serves to emphasize and enhance my sincere love and appreciation for each of you!  There is a rising, gentle inner strength and renewed softness of heart in me that feels more true to the heart of Christ and true to my original personality than the self-fueled, overcompensatory strength I was projecting a few years back.  God has reminded me that vulnerability, love, and kindness are wonderful, God-given strengths, not signs of weakness.  And I can make thoughtful decisions and set healthy boundaries and value myself, all while keeping a tender heart toward the people I love.

This reconnection was a gift in several ways, and I am grateful for all I've learned (and all I am still learning).  I have seen repeatedly that God can use every relationship and situation in our lives for good, even the really complicated and messy stuff.  It is always my tendency in writing posts like this to sift out the deeper meaning in the hard things, but I don't want to pretend that everything is all tied up in a neat little bow for me today.  I am still hurting and not fully okay, still working through parts of this story, still becoming who God intends me to be.  Healing is a process, so that is to be expected.

We serve a very personal and compassionate God, friends.  When we go through deep waters (or waves of grief), He holds our hand and will never let those strong waves drown us.  He is sovereign over everything we go through, and He times the seasons of our lives with great precision and care.  He brings beauty out of brokenness for those who love Him, and He makes everything beautiful for its own time (Ecclesiastes 3:11).  I was not wrong in my sincere belief that He is a God of redemption, restoration, and healing.  Sometimes that plays out externally in wonderfully-restored, lifelong relationships...  and sometimes He redeems our internal perspective, restores our courage, and heals our hearts! ❤

"But as for me, I will look to the Lord, and confident in Him I will keep watch; I will wait with hope and expectancy for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.  Do not gloat over me, my enemy!  Though I have fallen, I shall rise.  Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light!"  -Micah 7:7-8

To any hurting person reading through this, please know that you matter to God today!  The Father of compassion and the God of all comfort has not forgotten YOU, and He will never minimize your heart or dismiss your pain.  He is close to the brokenhearted, and He saves those who are crushed in spirit.  He is with you and for you, and His heart toward you is good and kind and powerful.  So feel it all and mourn your losses, but cling to Jesus as your lifeline and light in the darkness.  Our eternal hope in Christ is firm and secure, a hope powerful enough to anchor our souls in the midst of any storm.  And the God of hope promises to make all things new, so there are beautiful things ahead for each of us!

Letting go of what lies behind,
Let us PRESS ON to know and love Him. ❤