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by Dee Geray
The weekend before a very publicized event,
I listened to a conversation between two friends as they discussed “closure”
on significant events in their lives. One
had witnessed her father’s death at age 11; the other had been raped a few
years ago. As I watched the nightly
news reports about the execution of Timothy McVeigh and the responses from the
victim’s families, the word “closure” came into their dialogue with the
news reporters. The victims
and victim’s families were asked if they felt that they now had “closure”
to the events surrounding the bombing in Oklahoma.
The conversation between my friends came
back to me.
The layperson has taken closure to mean “a closed book in my life”.
The word has been used in this sense in a variety of circles, and if you
happen to bring up an issue among friends in veritably someone will say “you
need to get closure on that” or something similar.
I thought about my two friends and their conversation.
If they have “closure” about their events, why do they talk about it?
Their respective events are related only in that they both suffered a
trauma, so it wasn’t a matter of sharing to help one another with their grief.
This led me on a thinking journey about life.
Our life is a book. We are
born and we die. Our birth begins
the story; our death is the final sentence.
In between we have many chapters of our life.
Some long and drawn out, and some short and to the point. As in a
novel, each chapter builds upon the other, but the book isn’t finished until
the end. Closure about a
significant event doesn’t exist as a “closed book in my life”, only as one
of the chapters. As we enter a new
chapter, the event may come up again. The
event becomes a part of who we are. Decisions we make, words that we speak and
relationships that we have are derived from previous chapters in our book.
It’s like the Tanach where the author leads the reader through the
obscurity by carefully piecing together clues that lead to an eventual resolve.
Significant characters show up at the most unusual times, clues are given
that seem unrelated, obvious indicators are missed by the reader, and yet,
surprisingly in the end, it all falls into place and the mystery is solved.
This is our life. Each time
we are faced with our past, it plays a role in the present and the story builds.
Each chapter is build upon the others.
The events shape our characters, test our determination, and define who
we are. To think that traumatic
events can be forgotten is a lie. They
may become vague memories or distant emotions, but they are not forgotten. We
may go several days, months or years without thinking about them, but they are
not forgotten. They may become
easier to talk about, but they are not forgotten.
Each event has led us to where we are today and the story of
our life is still being developed. Until
death comes, there will be no “closure”, only another chapter.
