Brian Weiner

It’s hard to turn the page when you know someone won’t be in the next chapter, but the story must go on.

THOMAS WILDER

Turning the page can be one of the most excruciating exercises we might ever put ourselves through.

Even if we have known in our hearts that this day would someday arrive, it is always too soon, and always at the most inopportune time… especially in the case of losing a friend or loved one. When the moment surrounds an untimely death, all of the parties are left wondering what transpired and lamenting the incredible void that losing such a person leaves in their wake.

In the case of a relationship ending, where one or both partners do not want it to end, but circumstances dictate no other possible alternative, the weight of the world settles upon your shoulders and the painful decision must ultimately be made and lived by.

Sometimes this moment comes at the revelation that someone you believed was your friend or on your side, has proven otherwise, and the only option left is to sever the relationship and move on. No matter what the trespass was that gives you cause to part company, there will always be the lingering remembrances that keep a portion of what you held valuable between you, alive.

Finding the courage and fortitude to turn the page, is one of life’s greatest, and most uncomfortable lessons. In some cases, the page is turned quickly out of anger, but there is a lingering doubt that wants to keep flipping backwards to comfortable territory, rather than accept the page is turned and hereafter read forward.

Anthony Banks and Phil Collins of Genesis, most adeptly ensconced these feelings in a song, Fading Lights:

Like the story that we wish was never ending

We know some time we must reach the final page

Still we carry on just pretending

That there’ll always be one more day to go

And one day, there are no more days to go. The moment is there and the page has turned already, or you must choose to turn it.

If you know anyone who is suffering this cataclysmic loss through the holidays, reach out to them with extra tenderness. You honestly cannot begin to know their frame of mind, until you have been there, yourself.

Happy Tuesday!