Euthanasia

Some times that decision is easier than others.  Some times you can look at a situation and it rips your heart out of your chest but you know there is, absolutely, without a doubt, no other course of action but to end it all…  Other times… there is doubt.  Those are the bitch of a times.

Relationships are those kinds of times.  Nobody is dead.  Nothing is permanent… not REALLY.  But sometimes you have to just shut up and fucking decide… that that’s it… there is no more hope.  It is over, dead, forever, fully, nothing more, ever.

But you don’t WANT to do that.  Because who wants to have their hearts pulled out of their chests?  Who would choose that if maybe… maybe there was a little thread of hope here or there…  Maybe something could be salvaged… Maybe… just see each other at holidays…maybe if you make rules (no discussing politics or religion)…Maybe you can save something…  You’ve known each other for months, for years, all your lives…  You don’t want it to end.

So you put it on life support.  And then there’s another hurt.  And then there’s another one.  Another one.  Another one.  Sometimes the relationship should have died after the first ground shattering hurt.  But you patch things up, you duct tape the broken trust and tell yourself it’s just as strong as before…  But it’s not.  It’s not.

There are more little hurts.  And that duct tape, it just isn’t the same as a whole, unbroken trust.  But you don’t want to admit it to yourself.  Maybe you tell yourself that “good people forgive and forget” and you tell yourself those broken places are just where you’re still immature and haven’t gotten good enough at forgiving, yet…

And then there is another earth-shattering hurt. Bigger than the one before. First one person shatters the other.  In agony the other smashes back.  The duct tape can’t hold.  Pieces of trust go everywhere.  It is a trust murder scene.  But you still don’t want to call time of death… You pick up the pieces, handing each other shards of the others’ broken trust.  You cut your fingers and your heart trying to piece them together again…

The duct tape is bloody now as you plaster it on… you wrap some around your fingers while you’re at it… slap some on your heart… put on a brave smile and say, “It’s all okay…”

Because you don’t want to give up.  You don’t want it to end.  You truly do love each other…  But despite the claims, duct tape can’t really repair everything…

But love can.

And because you love each other, after a while, love starts to fill in the cracks in the trust.  A little at a time…  It’s a slow process, agonizing… So easy to destroy the scant bits of progress with a casual word, an unintended slight…  What an intact trust would deflect without so much as a scratch, the shattered, bloodied, duct taped, just barely starting to heal trust takes as a hammer blow.  More pieces crumple in… maybe not even enough to mention, you just fold a little more duct tape over them and go on…

But now instead of being a shield over the heart against the little pebbles and bumps of interaction, the broken trust is no longer a shield.  Not only no longer shielding but sucking with need.  Now the bumps and pebbles of ordinary life break more tiny holes in the shield and land, tiny but cumulative cuts and bruises on the heart.  The trust can no longer survive the incidentals, more than that… it needs… its broken places crying out… pleading, weeping… reassure me, comfort me…  Love alone is no longer enough.

The bumps and cuts accumulate on the heart.  The broken, weeping trust seeks, pleads…  And then there’s another hurt… a big one…  big enough it would have put cracks in an intact trust… One hurts… the other hurts back…

The shards are are so small by now they are practically pebbles.  But one more time… just one more time…  Because beneath it all… you do still love each other…

Then it happens.  A little bump.  A pea under the mattress.  A heavy raindrop.  A gust of wind…  It was inevitable, really…  Something was going to happen.  A little bump and the last pebbles of trust disintegrate.  Love can live on long after trust, but it is like a life without skin…  a life of nothing but raw nerves and pain… flinching at every breath, cringing at every touch, even kind words are taken as hurtful because there is nothing left to absorb even the gentle pressure of their sound…

And still you waver…  Euthanasia?  But you can’t even talk to each other, discuss the decision, every word, no matter how softly spoken, lands on exposed nerve endings.

Maybe you wonder if you shouldn’t have done this earlier, before it went so far…  But it’s so hard.  So hard to know.  So hard to give up when there might still be hope… even if it’s only the tiniest spark, it’s so hard not to drop it into into the jar, into the shattered, patched, duct taped chalice that was your trust in each other, and blow life back from that tiny spark.

But now it hurts to even pick up the spark.  The air to breathe it back to life would grate every nerve on its way in and back out.  Both of you sit, like generals across a treaty table.  Broken, bruised, bleeding… exhausted, and defeated.  You still don’t want it to end… but the pain of staying together has grown to the point that it is nearly equal to (entirely?  fully eclipsed?) the pain of  saying goodbye.

Maybe this is nature’s way of guiding you to what you need to do… make it too painful to go on doing anything else.

It’s hard, because you love each other.  Even now, broken and bleeding, the love is still there.  But it’s time…  It’s time for it to end…  And the best you can do is to make it peaceful…gentle…as painless as you can.

Set down the defenses, the hard words, the hurts, the past…

Look at each other and tell it truly, one last time.  I love you.

Then let it end.

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