Estrangement Grief Has No Funeral

Before I say anything else, I want to tell you who this letter is for.

It is for the parent who did what they could with what they had.

And it is for the child who does not understand their parent.

This is the hardest letter I have ever written.

I am not going to pretend that meeting estrangement with compassion and understanding is easy. It isn't. I have been estranged from my older daughter for almost two years, and I am only now finding the words to truly talk about it. I still don't get it right every time.

I am only telling you that compassion and understanding can exist alongside grief.

Before you read the rest, go read Ecclesiastes 3:1 through 8. It is the passage everyone knows about seasons, and there is one line in it that I did not notice for forty-four years.

The glitter

Yesterday I told you that if I had to explain what this kind of grief feels like, I would call it glitter. Today I want to show you what I mean.

The description came from a client years ago, and I have never been able to shake it.

She said it was like a container of glitter breaking open.

At first it is obvious. Loud. Devastating. The mess is everywhere you look and everybody can see it.

But what nobody warns you about is what comes after.

The smaller moments. The quiet places where it keeps turning up. A birthday. A holiday. A song in the car. A familiar road you were not prepared to feel differently.

The ache does not stay in one pile. It sprinkles itself into ordinary life.

I found some of mine on a road a few weeks ago.

A few months back, I moved. I found glitter sprinkled throughout every box, tucked into cupboards, and somehow woven into the memories of a life we once shared. I stopped more than once and wondered if she ever thinks about our family. If I ever cross her mind, because I miss her every day.

I sat on the garage floor going through boxes of memories far longer than I meant to. Pictures. Little things I had forgotten we kept. Pieces of a life that feels both close and impossibly far away.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I remembered something I sometimes lose when the grief gets loud: there were so many good moments.

Maybe that is part of grief too. Learning to let the good memories still be good, even when you wish the story had turned out differently.

That is the glitter. It does not stay where you put it. It shows up in grocery stores and on familiar roads and in the middle of moments you thought were safe.

And if the glitter catches you off guard and you wonder why it still hurts, don't be too hard on yourself. A moment can still hurt without meaning your healing disappeared.

Finding another piece does not mean I am back where I started.

What happened Monday

After I wrote you about the medieval pilgrims, I could not stop thinking about them.

They paid their debts before they left. They provided for the families they were leaving behind. They made a will. And they went and apologized to everyone they had offended before they walked out the door.

I have found myself doing much the same thing. There was one thing I had not done yet: reach out to the people I had not spoken to in a while.

So, on Monday, I reached out to my cousin, who I know has spoken to my daughter. I told her I didn't want to put her in the middle of anything, and I wasn't asking for a reply. I was leaving the country for 31 days to walk the Camino in Spain, and I didn't want to leave anything important unspoken. I asked if she would pass along one short message. She said, of course.

It was simple.

"Hey, it's Mom. I love you. I hope you're doing well. I'm not looking for a response."

I want you to notice that last line, because it is the whole thing.

I was not asking her for anything. I was not opening a negotiation or requesting a reply or trying to get something started before I leave.

I just did not want to fly to Spain with a what if.

I wanted everything said before I go.

It was heavy. It was hard. It needed to be done, and it did not make anything easier or better.

That is the honest report, and I am not going to dress it up.

Tuesday, I woke up with my eyes swollen. You read that letter. I let myself feel it, named what it was, and then reset the day before one hard morning could become another hard day.

I am not telling you to reach out.

Only you know your situation. And I want to say something about that carefully, because respecting the boundaries of an estrangement is the hardest part of it, and I have not been perfect at it either. So do not be too hard on yourself.

Reaching out has not helped my situation. It did not this week. That is just true.

For me, there was a difference between reaching out because I wanted something from her and sending one simple message so I would not leave with words still sitting in my chest.

That was my decision for my situation, not advice for yours.

And try not to let the world, or the opinions of other people, or even your own worst thoughts, define your situation for you.

Most of us are sitting in both chairs

One thing I have learned through midlife and my work with clients is that many of us are sitting in both chairs. This season has shown me something I did not fully understand before, sometimes life places us in a chair we never imagined we would occupy.

I have known distance from my own mother from the daughter's chair. I knew what I felt. I knew why I needed to change how I showed up. I knew the parts of the relationship that hurt me. What I did not understand was what that distance might feel like from her chair.

Then I experienced estrangement as a mother myself.

And suddenly I was sitting in the chair I had never occupied before.

It did not make every choice right. It did not erase why boundaries were needed. It gave me perspective I did not have before. I began to understand something about what my own distance may have felt like to my mother.

We are not mind readers. I cannot tell you what my mother feels, and I cannot tell you what my daughter feels. Only they can tell me that. But sitting in both chairs has taught me to leave room for what I cannot see.

There may be grief on the other side of the silence that neither person fully understands. A child may not understand the impact the silence is having on a parent. A parent may not fully understand what the relationship was asking the child to carry before the distance happened.

That does not make either side the villain. It reminds me how limited the view can be from one chair.

And it changed the way I see my own family. My mom did the best she could with what she had. When I was raising my daughter, I was doing the same. Sometimes we repeat what was never explained to us until somebody finally has the language, the tools, or the courage to interrupt it.

Sometimes the pattern is the problem before we ever understand how much the people are carrying it.

Scripture Study

Ecclesiastes 3:1 through 8

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to search and a time to give up. A time to keep and a time to throw away. A time to be silent and a time to speak.

Almost everybody knows this passage. It gets read at funerals and printed on things.

Read it again as somebody living in a silence you did not choose.

There is a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.

I did not notice that line for forty-four years.

It is sitting right there in the middle of the list, given exactly the same weight as being born and dying and weeping and dancing. Not as a failure. Not as something gone wrong.

As a season.

And then the last pair in the whole passage, which I cannot believe I never connected to my own book title.

A time to be silent and a time to speak.

Dig Deeper

There are fourteen pairs in that passage. Twenty-eight times, each one with its opposite.

And notice what the writer never does.

He never tells you which season you are in. He never gives you a way to find out. There is no test, no sign, no checklist for determining whether this is a time to embrace or a time to refrain.

That absence used to frustrate me. Now I think it might be the mercy in it.

Because if there were a way to know, then being in the wrong season would be your fault. And most of us did not choose the season we are standing in.

There is one more thing worth knowing. The passage is written by a man who has spent the whole book insisting that almost everything is meaningless. This is not a comfort poem dropped into a comfortable book.

It is a deeply skeptical man conceding that there is an order to things, even when he cannot see it and cannot explain it and would not have arranged it this way himself.

Which is close to where I am standing today.

Carrying someone on the Camino

Pilgrims have long carried people and intentions with them on the Camino. Historically, some medieval pilgrims even walked as proxies for someone who could not make the journey themselves.

I am not walking as anyone's proxy. But I will carry someone with me in prayer. I am learning that I can carry a name without chasing a person. I can love someone without requiring an answer. I can bring them before God and keep walking the road that is mine.

When the glitter shows up again

If you are living this and cannot fix it, or reaching out is not available to you or has not helped, the glitter will still show up. A song. A holiday. A place you thought would not hurt anymore.

You do not have to turn every sparkle into an action.

Sometimes you can simply notice it, grieve what it touches, and pray.

Pray over the situation. Pray for the person. And pray for yourself.

That last one is the one we often skip. We will pray for their heart, their life, their healing, and forget to ask God what He wants to soften, heal, or teach in us.

You are the only person in this whose response is actually in your hands.

Maybe that is what keeping walking looks like here.

Whose story is this?

There is one more thing I want to say because estrangement stories can become public very quickly.

Thirteen letters in, and I have never told you her story.

I have only ever told mine.

I could explain what happened, lay out who said what, and invite strangers to decide who was right. I am choosing not to.

You can tell the truth about your own grief without handing somebody else's private life to strangers.
Your pain is yours to tell. Their part in it is not.
~ Jenn

If you take one thing from this section, let it be that.

And if she ever reads this one day, I hope she knows this: I love her.

I can own my part, grieve what happened, and still love her.

Maybe that is part of the glitter too. Love does not disappear just because the relationship changed.

What would it look like to pray for myself in this, and not only for them?

Prayer

Camino Challenge: The Other Chair

This one is harder than it looks, and you can stop partway through if you need to.

Think of the person you are estranged or distant from.

Now write a short letter from the other chair, not as a claim about what they actually think or feel, but as an exercise in considering what you may not be able to see from your own chair.

Do not write the apology you wish they would give you, and do not pretend you know their private thoughts. Ask instead: What might this silence have cost them? What might they wish I understood? What could I be missing because I can only see from where I am sitting?

Three things before you start.

• This is not agreeing with them. Understanding a position is not the same as accepting it.
• This is not for them. You are not sending it. Nobody will ever read it.
• If you get two sentences in and cannot do it, stop. That is information, not failure, and it may simply not be time yet.

And if you are able to finish it, ask yourself one question at the end.

What might I not be able to see from my chair?

Tomorrow We'll Walk...

Four days from now I get on a plane.

Tomorrow, I want to talk about the goodbyes. Not the airport kind. The ones that happen in the days before, in kitchens and driveways and text messages, when everybody is being brave about it.

And about the thing nobody tells you, which is that leaving is often harder than the going.

Where has the glitter shown up for you? Write me back below. I read every one.