Ending the Estrangement
Consider this a nudge if you need one
“Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?”
This line echoes again and again through the novel, A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny. It surfaces through the experiences of different characters as they wrestle through various hurts in their lives and long-held antipathies they just can’t seem to let go.
While this line was in my mind, I came across the poem below by Ross Gay.
Estrangement between two people is not the main subject here, rather the estrangement of one person to another person’s pain.
Ending the Estrangement
By Ross Gayfrom my mother's sadness, which was,
to me, unbearable, until,
it felt to me
not like what I thought it felt like
to her, and so felt inside myself—like death,
like dying, which I would almost
have rather done, though adding to her sadness
would rather die than do—
but, by sitting still, like what, in fact, it was—
a form of gratitude
which when last it came
drifted like a meadow lit by torches
of cardinal flower, one of whose crimson blooms,
when a hummingbird hovered nearby,
I slipped into my mouth
thereby coaxing the bird
to scrawl on my tongue
its heart's frenzy, its fleet
nectar-questing song,
with whom, with you, dear mother,
I now sing along.
Gay’s poem incorporates another person’s sadness into his own experience. And by sitting with it, he realizes that her sadness doesn’t feel like what he thought it would. Rather he notices it settle gently within his experience as he lets the hummingbird write on his tongue, so that he can sing along to the song his mother’s sadness sings. Gay invites us to stay and be vulnerable instead of running from uncomfortable feelings.
There are all kinds of ways we are estranged: estranged from ourselves, other’s emotions, our own emotions.
And other people.
Is there someone you want to reconnect with? Is there someone you’ve been wanting to reach out to but the time or distance has seemed too far? “Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?”
I am not asking you to reach out to someone who continues to harm you, or to pretend as if the past hasn’t happened. Forgiveness does not mean being a doormat or continuing in unhealthy or manipulative patterns where there is no sign of change and mutual respect.
Rather, consider this a nudge if you’ve needed one, to bridge distance that you would like to overcome. If you’ve drifted farther from someone than you ever hoped to and are looking for an opening, may this be the time.
Maybe you pick one or two people you haven’t heard from in a while and start there. See this article from ADDitude Magazine for practical tips or opening lines.
And may ending the estrangement be for you, like for Ross Gay, a form of gratitude.
~What I’m reading~
A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny
Middle School Superpowers: Raising Resilient Tweens in Turbulent Times by Phyllis L. Fagell