Again, Because You Were There

Everything that begins will inevitably end.

This is a concept that I’m sure no one is likely to dispute, outside of philosophical and spiritual contexts. Yet there’s a chasm between knowing and accepting that we often struggle to cross.

It seems common to believe in an idealized “happily ever after,” and likewise to assume that the world being transient only matters for “other” people, that our own lives will remain forever unaffected and unchanged.

I understand. I like the idea of “forever.” I want to stay in an endless present where nothing changes or disappears. I’ve tried to do exactly that, living in a mental bubble oblivious of the future. But like everything that is created, that bubble eventually breaks, and we’re thrown into the question of what it means to accept loss — and not only to accept loss, but to live with it, to move forward in time again.

I think this question resonates most when it comes to the loss of people. People come into our lives, and one day, often unpredictably, they leave. No matter how perfect the relationship once seemed, they’re gone. That is not a truth I’ve wanted to believe, but one that life has taught me throughout the years.

I’ve grown apart from friends; most of the friends I made in my first year here, ones who I assumed would remain until graduation, I don’t see much anymore. (For all the struggling first-years, I didn’t meet my current best friends until junior year.) I’ve had a close friend move to the other side of the world. I’ve lost amazing friends through my own mistakes. I’ve watched an online friend disappear. And more than once, I’ve kneeled over while crying about friends who passed away, so shocked that I physically lost the ability to speak for hours.

And yet, even if the promised happily-ever-after has betrayed our trust: Once upon a time, those people were there. They were there — and the past is the one part of life that the future can never completely change.

I began to treasure the past, because you were there.

The end to a relationship represents a form of grief. Whether a friend or a partner, whether emotionally close or distant, whether they passed away or don’t talk to you anymore, whether permanent or temporary — every parting deserves to be mourned. Because, in the face of loss, we not only grieve the past we shared together, but also the unwound future: the eternity where they won’t be there, our ongoing life in which our memories of them remain frozen in time.

And yet, once we part ways, we have to move on. So we take loss, whatever it is, living day by day, and we move forward. But eventually we come to a fork in the path — maybe anger or guilt that life is still advancing, hesitation to become close to others again, or anxiety in trying what failed before — and moving forward is no longer enough. We also have to choose.

I think each fork in the road presents two options: to internalize the pain of loss and meld it into our worldview, freezing ourselves in time; or to accept our fear of “again” and move on. We can’t resist that fear, because pain never completely leaves us, and to feel pain is to be human. But even when we feel pain, we don’t have to suffer. We suffer when we respond to pain by rejecting reality, by clinging to what we love in an attempt to make it last forever.

I don’t like reality, and I don’t think I can. It hurts so much. But I’ve learned that by not fighting the flow of time, by allowing change and acceptance to coexist, I can move on. And it’s so hard to not only choose but also to walk down the path to acceptance, time after time, and to recognize whenever we’ve gone the wrong way. We’ll never reach the horizon. But only once we walk towards it on our curving path will we begin to feel okay, again.

I learned to live life to the fullest, because you were there.

This abstract theorizing about how to restart our flow of time after losing a relationship, like everything in my column this semester, seeks to offer an answer to questions no one can ever solve. And I know that, in a moment of grief, any attempt to make sense of loss disintegrates. So the practice of radically accepting change and pain in order to move on can’t be an emergency skill, but a way of living life. It doesn’t shield us from pain, but it’s a way of appreciating every moment that we experience and taking no one for granted; of recognizing that recovery, not suffering, makes us stronger; of seeing the infinite possibilities for the future that always persist.

It’s a way of grasping the beauty in the world.

After all, your pain represents your love for the person you lost. We’d do anything to avoid pain; but simultaneously, it’s proof that we’re here, and proof that, once upon a time, they were there. It’s proof that their memory walks with us in the life we lead, by our side.

I promised that I’d walk again, because you were there.

Maybe soon, the time to say goodbye will return. Yet even though emotional bonds inevitably break, and break painfully, that pain is a beginning to a new chapter of life. That doesn’t mean we should willingly embrace the crushing pain that life’s changes inflict, but it does mean that we should do our best not to let the pain turn into suffering. We should live life in the present — not a present with an illusion of eternity, but a present that is open to the future, which will help us to appreciate those we care about in the moment, and to carry their memory onward with us once they’re gone.

The least we can do is send them off with a smile, once we’re ready. A smile that says, “We aren’t together anymore, but I see a new world worth living for, and I’ll take you there; and I became a person who could say that, because you were there.”

Ben T. Elwy ’23 lives in Quincy House. Their column, “The Smiles We Choose,” appears on alternating Thursdays.