I often tell close friends and clients, who come from “tidier” stories than my own, how deeply I respect the difficult work they do to name subtle loss in their lives. The inventory of my history is full of what I call “headline” words: abuse, divorce, adoption. These labels mean I’ve always had ample, justifiable evidence for deep dives into seasons of healing. It’s those I know and love who lives are filled with more covert abuse dynamics, emotional neglect and well-masked trauma who often wrestle for decades to find the words that describe their story.
Fiction writer Fredrik Backman is masterful at painting the subtle shifts of loss in everyday life. In his book Us Against You, he describes the physical and verbal evidence of a deteriorating marriage. This week I’ll share a passage about the physical drift of intimacy and next week a verbal example. Though these excerpts highlight one type of relationship, they are lens through which we can imagine what loss looks like with any person in our life.
“A long marriage consists of such small things that when they get lost we don’t even know where to start looking for them. The way she usually touches him, as if she didn’t mean to, when he’s washing up and she’s making coffee and her little finger overlaps his when they put their hands down on the kitchen counter together. His lips brush her hair fleetingly as he passes her at the kitchen table, the two of them looking different ways. Two people who have loved each for long enough eventually seem to stop touching each other consciously, it become something instinctive; when they meet between the hall and kitchen, their bodies somehow find each other. When they walk through a door, her hand ends up in his as if by accident. Tiny collisions, every day, all the time. Impossible to construct. So when they disappear, no one knows why, but suddenly two people are living parallel lives instead of together. One morning they don’t make eye contact, their fingers land a few inches further apart along the counter. They pass each other in a hallway. They no longer bump into each other.”
When have you experienced a loss of physical closeness? When did a caregiver’s illness, a move at a young age, a natural disaster, your developing body or the fickleness of a friend steal a comforting and secure experience? What clarify of grief comes when you consider a physical drift of intimacy in a current relationship? If Backman were describing a scene between you and this person, what picture of subtle loss would he paint?
