No Closure

 

Not had closure cannot be enough

You always were a guy tough

Smoothened the diamond rough

And then I was left second guessing

The sky the clouds the rainbows

the sunrise increasingly distressing

Love we cannot have

Friends we cannot be

What else is left for me to be?

A writer of pomes and dreadful tomes?

Explain where the deceit came in?

When lies were hidden from the beginning?

What am I to you?

Just another lark a song?

Why did you do me this wrong

Why did you pick me from the throngs?

Tell me all for I cannot hold it longer

I will take it to my resting place

Please tell me all Can things get any wronger?

For once revive me from this daze

The Muse

Closure Is a Myth

Freepik

 Moving forward without 

resolution, understanding, or apology.

The last conversation you had with your brother was an argument about something neither of you can remember now. He died three weeks later in an accident that gave neither of you time to fix anything. No reconciliation. No final understanding. No chance to say what needed to be said.

You keep replaying that argument, searching for the moment where you could have chosen differently. You imagine the conversation you would have had if you’d known it was the last one. You construct elaborate scenarios where he apologizes, where you apologize, where both of you finally understand each other and the tension that defined your relationship dissolves into clarity.

These imagined conversations feel necessary. 

Like if you can just figure out what should have been said, you can somehow retroactively complete the relationship. Like understanding why things went wrong will allow you to file the experience away in some organized mental cabinet labeled “resolved” and move on with your life.

But that conversation will never happen. 

That understanding will never arrive. 

The relationship ended mid-sentence, and no amount of analysis will add a period to that hanging clause.

This is the reality most of us spend enormous energy avoiding: 

• Some stories don’t have endings. 

• Some conflicts don’t get resolved. 

• Some relationships don’t achieve understanding before they terminate. 

• Some people who harmed you will never acknowledge what they did. 

• Some questions about why things happened the way they happened will never be answered.

We’ve been sold a therapeutic fiction that healing requires closure. 

That you can’t move forward until you have resolution. 

That emotional health depends on achieving understanding about past events and receiving acknowledgment from people who hurt you.

This fiction keeps people trapped for decades, waiting for something that isn’t coming so they can finally begin the life they’ve put on hold until they receive it.

1. What if closure isn’t something that happens to you? 
2. What if it’s something you construct internally, regardless of whether external circumstances provide resolution?

The ancient Stoics lived in a world where closure was rare. 

People disappeared into slavery or exile without goodbye. 

Loved ones died suddenly from plague or violence. 

Political allies became enemies without explanation. 

Betrayals went unacknowledged. 

Injustices remained unanswered.

Yet Stoic philosophy doesn’t include a chapter on achieving closure. 

There’s no technique for getting the apology you need or the understanding you deserve. 

Instead, there’s a relentless focus on how to live well when circumstances don’t provide what you need from them.

Chrysippus argued that we suffer not from events themselves but from our judgments about what events should include. 

When you insist that you need closure to move forward, you’re not describing a psychological requirement. 

You’re describing a preference you’ve elevated to a necessity.

The difference matters enormously. 

A preference, you can work around. 

A necessity, stops you completely.

in, Stoic Wisdom

Praise Song for the Day

 

Each day we go about our business,

walking past each other, catching each other’s

eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is

noise and bramble, thorn and din, each

one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning

a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,

repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,

with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,

with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky.

A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words

spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,

words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark

the will of some one and then others, who said

I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.

We need to find a place where we are safe.

We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,

who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built

brick by brick the glittering edifices

they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.

Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,

the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,

others by first do no harm or take no more

than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,

love that casts a widening pool of light,

love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,

any thing can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Elizabeth Alexander

Thanksgiving & Belonging

Danny Raustadt

Who matters in your life today and

 how has it changed? 

Every year, as the leaves pile up on the ground here in New York, these questions begin to peak for me. 

• To whom do I want to reach out for a holiday check in? 

• Whom do I want to dance with on New Year’s Eve? 

• Where do I want to focus my relational energy? 

As lives change, so do the answers, but 

what stays the same for me is what I seek in all my relationships: 

belonging, connection, honesty, loyalty, support, adventure, (and sometimes commiseration).

Belonging has long been at the heart of my work. 

Belonging is that sense of safety, comfort, and happiness that we feel when we are part of a group, place, tradition, relationship, or friendship. 

Our identities are intertwined with our experiences of belonging. 

Have you noticed how different parts of yourself become activated with different people and places? 

At home, I’m a mother and a partner. 

At work, I’m a therapist. 

In New York, I’m an immigrant. 

In my native Belgium, I’m an expat coming home for a visit. 

I speak nine languages and in every one a different part of me is expressed. 

Whenever my American and Belgian friends meet, they often compare notes. Long lasting friendships bring the many parts of us into alignment, grounding us in continuity. Old friends remind each other of who we were then and how much we’ve grown. 

We’ve been there for each other in excitement and boredom, in celebration and tragedy.‍

Decades ago now, after living in America for seven years, it seemed as if all my friends were leaving. I socialized then mostly with other foreigners and many were going back—to Amsterdam, Paris, Tel Aviv, to where they were from or to the next place they would call home. 

I suddenly felt like I was the only one who didn’t know where they belonged. 

When a friend of mine generously lent me his house for Thanksgiving, I wasn’t sure whom to invite. 

So I thought of the people whom I wanted to get to know better. 

Along with a few close friends, ten new ones came. 

None had ever met but they were all game to spend five days together. 

Thirty years later, that same group still meets every year for Thanksgiving. ‍

We’ve seen partners come and go. 

There are now fourteen children amongst us, many of whom join each year. 

I didn’t know what “chosen family” meant before this group. 

Having my own has created a whole new definition of what “family” can mean. 

Recently, I asked one of my friends in the group to reflect on this. 

She focused less on the Thanksgivings we’ve shared and more on how the group has been there for each other when our families of origin could not. She lost her mother during the social-distancing era of the pandemic. Members of the Thanksgiving group gathered outside her apartment, apart but together, for a small service. When she could finally travel to clean out her mother’s home in Florida, two members of the group came with her.

We all weren’t always this close. 

Thirty years of Thanksgivings together made us fixtures in each others’ lives. 

In our secular and transient modern world, the holidays have become for many the only time in which gathering is ritualized. 

So make it a ritual. 

Come together with intention. 

Come prepared to participate—to prep, to cook, to clean together. 

You never know how these relationships might evolve. 

It’s never too late to start your own Thanksgiving group. 

Any combination of family, friends, and strangers will do, as long as you remember why you’re doing it. 

Co-creating a sense of belonging is one of the most satisfying aspects of having relationships at all.

Let’s Turn the Lens on You

Think about the people in your life.

• Whom would you like to have at your Thanksgiving table? Why?

• What would it mean for you to open your home to them? Or to ask one of them to host a group in their home?

• Find a collaborator to share the organizational load.

• Both of you can invite 5 people who’d be fun to bring together. They can know each other or not.

• Invite everyone to bring one dish that is traditional for them.

• Invite everyone to join early to prep. Make sure they know everyone will be cleaning up together too.

• Consider having a few prompts for dinner conversation, perhaps about the year behind and the new year ahead.

Esther Perel