grieving a beautiful lie

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Mr. Keats tells us that beauty and truth are one and the same. I respectfully disagree. I've never seen anything flowerier and more colorful than the bullshit people peddle themselves.

One of the mental muscles I seem to lack is the capacity for grieving over something that never existed. This condition is apparently not genetic. My family is a huge proponent, particularly with regard to canonizing our parents (or for that matter, reburying them together). Later in life, Dad became gentle, kind, generous, they tell me. He didn't swear, and he was great with the grandkids. Okay, fine. I smell bullshit, but whatever makes them happy is fine. Yet if I try to talk about Dad's transgressions—say, his attempts to strangle me—I'm immediately cut off. "Stop emphasizing the negative, John." Oh yes. When he "changed" late in life, that somehow changed the continuum of his whole life. I get it now. Sorry to have spoken the truth in my siblings' presence.

757_2294_large.jpgBut at least in their case, the lie is meant to make them feel better. A buddy of mine married an astoundingly selfish, childish woman. At his wedding, we guests placed over/under bets on the divorce. Not at the reception—in the church. He admitted to not loving her, but to him she represented his only shot at normality and stability, so he took it. And for years his friends watched him die in the relationship until, inevitably, he found comforts elsewhere. When, many affairs and many years too late, he filed for divorce, he sat in my office and blubbered over his lost love. I did not recognize the wife over whom he grieved; she truly existed only in his recent imagination. I was speechless. Life has so much actual awfulness. Why imagine up fiction about which to feel awful? Dump her and get on with the good part of your life, already.

I have not been impervious to grieving lies, myself. A while back I cracked open the Fucking Amy box and, for the first time since we broke up, I looked at her pictures and read her letters. I was surprised by what I found. This was not the woman, the beautiful lie, I'd remembered and for which I'd grieved. What a dull, unremarkable child she was. How on earth had I ever concluded that life could not go on without this pointless person? I felt embarrassed. I wondered if my friends had felt that way but had been too polite to say anything. And what did this beautiful lie gain me? A couple years of dysfunction based on my own bullshit imaginings, followed by a massive embarrassment chaser. More, please.

The ugly truth: trust it, embrace it, wallow in it. It'll set you free.