Unfixability

No one rushes toward unfixable situations. We don't like movies that end without resolution. Bridges of Madison County just about sent me over the edge because I was left hanging--as were the daughters in the movie.
I've noticed that various clinical populations are not first choice of a target group for many clinicians. People with progressive neuromuscular problems like Lou Gehrig's disease or children with cystic fibrosis--these are not top picks for new medical residents to select as an area of specialty. When it comes to therapy, few therapists are rushing to work with people with Alzheimer's Dementia. It is an agonizing, progressive illness that leaves family members in emotional limbo. It can't be fixed, only endured. It is a type of ambiguous loss--chronic, frozen, traumatic, unrecognized loss that cannot be resolved.

There are many life situations in which people may be held against their will. They may be too horrified to mobilize their energies to make a plan that will help them cope. They may be so off-balance and exhausted from trying to predict what will happen next that they have given up trying to influence their situation one way or the other. Or they become depressed from feeling helpless with the unfixability they face continually.

Parents whose children are kidnapped, adults married to alcoholics, people caught in family feuds, those with chronic illnesses--all of these people suffer ambiguous losses. These are complex losses. There are confusing, unresolvable and unrelenting aspects of their situations that prevents them from being able to move on.

I am acutely aware of an ambiguous loss that I have in vain tried to cope with for nearly 20 years. Family members have cut one another off and I stand at the edge of a dark pool of hostility, regret, pain, and misunderstanding. There is nothing I can do about it. I did nothing to make it happen, but I have been deeply affected by it. It is something that I cannot fix. There are no sides to take and yet I am pulled in all directions over the relationships I choose to maintain. An emotional Switzerland of sorts. There is nothing pleasant or easy about any of it.

Oh, there are reasons for it, all right, according to both sides--of which I hear no end of commentary. Everyone wants to be right. Everyone nurses their pain--significant pain, that is nearly palpable. Everyone justifies their attitude, behavior, feelings. Everyone pulls in friends, neighbors, counselors to see their side of things. It goes on and on without any way to escape unless I cut everyone off and go my own way. But then I will have lost even the illusion that I have a family left.

In ambiguous losses such as happened to the wife of Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway, it is hard to keep the emotional door open. Pain begs for closure and relief. The wife decided that Tom was dead and she remarried. It was too hard to hang in limbo and deal with the unknowingness of it all. Her worst fears were realized when Tom showed up, quite alive.

When children are kidnapped, their parents can make a shrine of their empty bedroom. And after a time, they can also make that same room into a study or hobby room--just as though that child never existed. Some parents will forbid their other children to ever mention the kidnapped child's name again. It is too painful. Shut the door on possibility and act as though it is over. Even though it isn't. That's how many people cope with these "leave-me-in-limbo" losses.

There are real temptations to aim at clarity and crisp boundaries in ambiguous losses, even at the expense of failure to deal with the situation. It is so uncomfortable to live with uncertainty, unpredictability, helplessness, and the emotional rollercoaster that accompanies the confusion of ambiguous losses. It is like living at the edge of an open grave and putting your whole energy into keeping from falling into it yourself.

Tonight, one of my relatives is in labor for her first child. The family schism prevents me from joyfully celebrating this with the very family member who would be most excited. Instead, I temper my words, censor my comments and wish inside that I could be free of all this intrigue and unfairness. If I slip up and mention a name or event that I shouldn't, or allude to anything on the "secrets" list, I'll either be denigrated and mistrusted, or grilled and mistrusted. Yet if I hold everything inside, I become the most flat, boring person in the world--the careful, stoic guard of everything privileged from both sides.

In the last year there has been more discomfort related to my family than in the rest of my years put together--watching the grief, pain, regret, anger, and finally death that has occurred. And my heart has taken a beating in all of this. The range of acceptable responses to everyone is becoming more and more narrow by the week. It continues on, trapping me in the tangle of unresolved brokenness.

Some things are unfixable. For now, I long for the Day when everyone will be able to know as they are known, and to see life and truth as it really is.