Beginning now...

[AntoniaB]

I understand the "need" to want to know why, but I agree with Beatrice, it just isn't going to happen. I mean, I guess in the very rare instances where someone comes out of MLC and is really honest with him/herself about the whole thing and gets some form of help and mends all the fences, maybe those people give others SOME insight into what they did/why, but often they too will just say "I could see myself doing X and Y and didn't know why."

I just read this article by Bernie Madoff's son's suicide which I guess happened some time ago; it was written by his wife who says she will never make any sense of it as she says right before he killed himself, he had written her all this stuff about how happy he was. When I read that article, I thought, you know, now THERE is someone who is facing something even more difficult than a lot of us, a person who just wakes up one day to find that everything is a lie AND the husband took his own life.

Let me spin this for you differently: we always say we are all a part of all the people we have met and all the people in our lives who are close to us change us in some way.

Perhaps whatever "good" face these people are able to show to the world, even if we're not part of that world, is there primarily because of OUR association with them in the past?

I just reconciled with a friend with whom I'd had a big falling out. She is a fairly new teacher. Even in the time she and I were estranged, she admitted that it was "killing her" to not be able to talk to me about her insecurities at work (and I had many moments where I had a knee-jerk reaction to want to talk to her too and could not). And I know that my "influence" on her and her on me carried with us even when we weren't speaking and off in our own little worlds.

Just something to think about.

I keep thinking about Byron Katie's book and her whole thing about how you need to isolate the thing that is hurting us and we need to spin it differently.

As in, if it hurts us all to see these people "move on" publicly, hosting parties, being social with others, etc, to the exclusion of those who were once a huge part of their lives, we than have to ask ourselves, who would we be, what would life be like, if we didn't have this hurt, if we just said we're not going to keep asking why or wondering how this can be, and honestly, we'd probably find it easier to move on ourselves.