Closure

When you leave your country and come back periodically, or permanently as is now my case, you notice trends, groundswells of popularity for things or notions that only had a shadowy existence in the past. Take Asiago cheese. Where did that come from? I had never heard of it, but about eight to ten years ago Asiago was suddenly on every menu. Was there a surplus in Italy that Sysco got wind of? And what about tilapia? When I was a kid there was haddock, catfish, flounder, not to mention what I was raised on: frozen “fish” patties. But I had never heard of tilapia.

Language goes through pendulum swings, too. What’s up with “My bad” and its counterpart – on the opposite end of the spectrum – “I’m good”? I didn’t ask you if you behaved well, I asked how you were. But that’s probably just the old dried up sourpuss grammarian in me. As a human, however, there’s another new emotional, armchair-psychological, faddish development I take issue with: closure.

Closure is a tempting notion. Something bad happens, you want closure and poof! It’s gone. A loved one dies, you get divorced, or a friendship ends: Americans seek closure, the panacea for all woes.

Rituals to mark sad occasions abound as time-honored ways of helping us handle bereavement. Over time every culture has developed its own way of mourning the death of a loved one, some of which last for months or even years: a fitting way to grieve over the survivors’ loss and honor the deceased person’s memory. Mourning is messy; it can entail wailing, sometimes even with formal paid wailers, special clothing – widow’s weeds, or ritual purification, prayers, or processions. Yet it also involves love and togetherness, solidarity and support in the guise of dishes cooked and brought over, company kept with the bereaved family. All of this in its motley, makeshift, utterly human way gradually lures the mourners back into the world while acknowledging their loss.

But closure isn’t about mourning, and it’s not a slow process: it’s a modern, streamlined version. It’s quick and simplistic and tries to erase everything in one fell swoop.

Closure is business-like. We perform a quick act with the aim of sweeping that sadness under the carpet and getting on with the bright side of life. After the Oklahoma City bombings, some suggested that the families of the victims watch McVeigh’s death as a form of closure. As if that could erase the loss. Or, less drastically, some celebrated the jury’s decision as a form of closure. But did justice really heal anything? Now the loss is… what? Karmically offset? Nullified? The idea behind closure is neat efficiency: instead of coexisting with the sadness of loss, we perform or witness a quick act with the expectation that it will cauterize that wound and erase that scar, pronto!

Sadness, like death, is part of life. Why we try to avoid it is understandable; why we think we can is incomprehensible. American culture is deeply uncomfortable with anything associated with sadness, and hence with death. I remember being disconsolate soon after a very painful event. A friend told me, “Maybe you need to take antidepressants.” I was flabbergasted. I was sad! I was sad for a reason and I felt I had the right to be. That was not abnormal and it was not clinical; it was a healthy response to loss. I wasn’t floundering, giving up, burrowing inward, plunging into the abyss. I was rightfully sad. I wanted to be allowed to be sad, yet it seemed that I was violating some happy pact. Apparently we do not allow ourselves time to mourn anymore; instead we seek the mythical grail of closure so we can get on with the brisk business of life.

By the time we reach a certain age, most of us have already experienced serious loss. And if you have, you know it’s not something you can quickly cauterize and then blithely gloss over. If only! Instead, loss gradually tears away at the edges of our bright, shining youthful selves; it beats our innocence into submission and leaves us battered and bruised. In our culture we then desperately seek that band-aid, that cure-all – closure – to try to get back to where we were pre-loss ASAP. Why not simply accept our rips, shreds, and bruises? They are our history, and they don’t go away. Like all our experiences, they season us and they burnish us; they make us who we are. They are an inextricable part of our biography. There is no need to wallow in them, but nor is there a reason to erase them. And let’s face it: even if we wanted to we couldn’t.

So, reluctantly, Asiago and tilapia are keepers, I guess: Sysco says so. “My bad” and “I’m good” are grammatical abominations, but I’ll save tirades on them for another day. Closure, on the other hand, is what needs to be swept under the proverbial rug and replaced with an acceptance of mourning and sadness, acknowledgement that life and its travails are a messy business that sometimes needs time to be processed and never wholly goes away – the good or the bad.