How to bury a friend
I learned how to bury a friend recently.
It was one of the most painful experiences of my life.
No one tells you that there is a process to burying someone whom you loved with all your heart, that there is a method to lowering the substance of all that made up the friendship, into the ground and letting go of the memories that will be left behind.
No one tells you that burying a friend means that a part of you gets buried with them as well.
No one tells you how excruciating the process is, especially when the friend you are burying is someone who was never your friend in the first place.
Let me save you the time and heartache. It’s the least I can do coming from the dark road I had to walk on.
Friendships that are built on a lie are the hardest to let go off.
It is not hard to fathom why.
You invested your time, emotions and your very essence in someone who presented a picture of themselves that was a lie all along.
You were there for someone who never intended to be there for you but who sold you the dream that they would be.
You gave yourself up for someone who had no intention of sharing even the most innermost part of themselves from the beginning but sold you the dream that they would.
You were with someone who was not with you from the start.
But you ignored the signs; the red flags that basically flapped furiously in the wind right before your eyes;
The laid-back attitude to things that you valued with every drop of your blood.
The promises that were made and were broken with the flimsiest of excuses that made you feel that you had to be worth more than that.
The feeling that you were disappearing and making yourself small for this person without them asking and the vacillation between feelings of fear and belief, that they would see the sacrifices that you were making for them and meet you half way.
You ignored all the signs. And this is where the most important process of burying a friend who was never a friend starts:
The realization that you ignored all the signs and forged a friendship with someone who told you who they were from the very beginning.
The realization that you knew who they were, but you thought that they would be different for you, because you know, after Jesus, you were the world’s most awesome person.
The realization that you lowered your standards and reduced your expectations.
The realization that you let them in first and after that, kept letting them in until nothing in you belonged to you anymore.
The minute you are able to admit this to yourself without that defensive voice in your head countering it, you just dumped the body into the ground and picked up the shovel.
After this, I do not promise that rebuilding yourself will be easy, because really, that is what you will need to do. Rebuilding will require that you ask yourself what expectations you discarded, what standards you hacked away and then redo them again. This process is like shoveling dirt over the coffin, several scoops of dirt that will leave you feeling bereaved, but it will also leave you with a sense of resolution that will make moving on relatively easier.
This process will also come with the struggle to forgive yourself for being gullible and a bit egotistical, because an exaggerated sense of self-worth ultimately causes you to assume that the everything will bend in your favor, including people who have no intention or desire to change for anyone, even for themselves.
So, you will need to say something like, “John or Jane, you were kind of stupid to think that you could love someone into changing for you.”
And then forgive yourself for this, truly forgive yourself. Because at this point, the dead body in the ground is not the one that needs forgiving even though forgiving them is another step. You need to forgive yourself, redefine those standards and move on.
You may never get parts of yourself back, it’s a good thing though, because those parts that you lose are the parts that you don’t need anymore. You will understand as you go along that you grew new parts and have evolved into something much better, stronger and wiser.
Burying a friend who was never a friend is not the easiest thing to do in the world, but it is doable.
So, if you have someone in your life right now, a person whom you are trying to love into changing, someone you know does not deserve the time, resources and effort you give, and are this very moment, reminding yourself of why this friendship will work, you might only be postponing the inevitable. Better to bury now then be buried later, don’t you think?
