Today is the first day of the Sedona Retreat 2019. Eleven women from every corner of the U.S. as well as central Canada have gathered here in breathtaking Sedona to work on healing and moving on from wife abandonment. We had our first workshop today and one topic that came up often was the wish for closure. Several women talked about the tremendous frustration they feel due to the fact that their husbands just vanished without any proper conversation or explanation. It left them hanging - longing for closure.
What is closure? After a long term relationship, closure means a husband showing respect and sensitivity to the fact that the wife did not want the marriage to end and is deeply grieved by his decision. He would do that by providing time and effort to help his wife integrate what has happened - to talk it through, try to help her understand his change of feelings, care about how she is going to adjust to her new reality.
But many men who decide to leave either have stopped caring or are deeply uncomfortable with their wife's distress and choose to distance themselves from it as quickly as humanly possible, leaving the wife without any expressions of heartfelt concern.
That leaves the wife needing to find a way to give up the wish for a sense of closure that she will never experience. It's a decision she must make, for her own mental health, to accept that she will not receive that expression of concern. She has to decide to let it go and move on nevertheless. Hoping and longing take a lot of energy. To truly care for herself, she needs to accept that for some things in life, closure is an unavailable luxury.
Along the line of letting go, I wanted to share with you a poem by Safire Rose that I like a lot.
She Let Go
She let go.
She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.
She let go of the fear.
She let go of the judgments.
She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head.
She let go of the committee of indecision within her.
She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons.
Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.
She didn’t ask anyone for advice.
She didn’t read a book on how to let go.
She didn’t search the scriptures.
She just let go.
She let go of all of the memories that held her back.
She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward.
She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.
She didn’t promise to let go.
She didn’t journal about it.
She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer.
She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper.
She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope.
She just let go.
She didn’t analyze whether she should let go.
She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter.
She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment.
She didn’t call the prayer line.
She didn’t utter one word.
She just let go.
No one was around when it happened.
There was no applause or congratulations.
No one thanked her or praised her.
No one noticed a thing.
Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.
There was no effort.
There was no struggle.
It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad.
It was what it was, and it is just that.
In the space of letting go, she let it all be.
A small smile came over her face.
A light breeze blew through her.
And the sun and the moon shone forevermore…
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Let me know your thoughts about closure below. Are you still holding out hope? Did you get the closure you want? Tell us more!
