I have a good friend who talks to me often about losing the love of his life. I listen because that's what friends do. I wanted to share his story with my readers because I know some of you are in or have been in a similar situation.

 

It's been sometime now since she left. His heart was broken and his life was shattered, he says, sometimes to the point that it was a chore to just make it through the day.

 

After a while, the sharp, constant pain of loss morphed into a more general feeling of uneasiness and incompleteness that dictated his moods and behavior.

 

He used to be quite the party guy. He loved going out and having good times with his friends. He doesn't go out much anymore.

 

Instead, he spends a lot of his time listening to music; especially songs that have special meaning for him like Journey's "When You Love A Woman" and Kenny Roger's "I Can't Unlove You."

 

I told him what I think anyone else would tell him; that he needed to jump back into the fray and find someone else. He replied simply that I didn't understand. There could never be someone else, he said. He promised her he would love her forever. He promised her there would never be another woman in his life. He has honored that promise and will continue to do so, whether or not she ultimately honors the promises she made to him.

 

He sleeps a lot now, especially during the day. He often takes a nap over his lunch hour and another after he gets home from work. Not normal behavior for a person of his age and vitality but he says the only time he's able to find some semblance of peace is in his sleep because he dreams about her and, in those dreams, things are always good. Then he awakes to discover they're not.

 

I suggested that maybe he should see a doctor and get some medicine that would improve his mood. He said he will not do that because the pain he feels is real and he doesn't want that pain to be masked artificially.

 

Something happened a few weeks ago that gave him a glimmer of hope. He asked me not to specify the details of what happened in this column but that the sometime overwhelming sense of dread and hopelessness he regularly feels did not accompany him to bed the night it happened like it usually did.

 

The following day was the best day he had had since she walked out of his life. There was once again a spring in his step and a smile on his face. Friends of his have been telling him for some time that he doesn't smile as much as he used to. But on that day, everything looked better than it had in a long time. People seemed nicer, the sky looked brighter, his mind was clearer, and he realized this was the way he used to feel every minute of every day for almost four years when she loved him and he loved her.

 

For the next several days he was able to maintain his found-again identity and optimism, believing that what had happened several days before would happen again.

 

But it didn't.

 

And he slowly and steadily fell back once again into the deep abyss of loss, grief, depression, and deprivation.

 

Most of us are aware of the five stages of grief that people go through when they lose someone, either through death or rejection, or they receive any kind of bad news: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.

 

He acted badly for a brief period of time during the anger stage but, since then, he will speak no ill of the woman he continues to love and will not allow others to either, at least in his presence.

 

The experts say that some people get stuck in a particular stage and it's impossible for them to move on until they can somehow get unstuck. Those who don't get stuck and proceed through the stages as they're supposed to don't understand those who aren't able to. Those people who have been fortunate enough in their lives to have never gone  through the stages at all don't understand those who get stuck either. Neither group has any awareness of what the person who IS stuck is enduring; consequently, they tend to have little or no understanding, sympathy, or compassion for him.

 

My friend is stuck. He's stuck right up to the axle. Many people think they have the ability to get him unstuck but he's convinced there's only one who actually can.

 

As I mentioned at the beginning of the column, my friend is not alone in his despair. Most people have experienced loss in one form or another and everyone deals with it differently. Some build barriers around their hearts that prevents anyone from getting really close to them so if they ever do lose them, the pain is not so great. Others simply aren't able to develop intimate relationships with others at all and, consequently, suffer little if any loss if the other person leaves. Then there are those few, like my friend, who learned early in life the value and joy of deep, personal, intimate relationships with certain special people in their lives and the accompanying, almost unbearable, sense of loss when those special people leave or are taken from them.

 

Many of us know people who suffered such loss when someone died or left that they preserve the room the other person occupied literally as a shrine, leaving everything just the way it was the last time they were there. My friend has done that as well; throwing away nothing, discarding nothing, moving or changing nothing; desperately trying to keep things exactly as they were because, in his mind, that was the closest his life had ever come to being perfect.