Speaking to me a year after the death of our mother, my brother, John, said: 

Yeah, I gotta tell you, I wasn’t emotionally shook up and I haven’t been.  Part of this I attribute to my completely having felt loved and in a loving relationship with my mother, where I didn’t feel that I was withholding anything.  I’ve only discovered a few lies I’ve told her that I feel ashamed about since her passing.  And they aren’t incompletions, they’re just lies.  You know dammit, I took her car and didn’t tell her.  I left mud in the driveway and didn’t cover it.  So, I could say really honestly that I was not attached to the woman in the box.  [She was gone, and he was complete.]  My mother was in my heart and had blessed me with sound judgment and good faculties to navigate my life.  And a good sense of fairness, decency, and humanity to guide me.  I’d given her the gifts of loving her as a son in a way that made her proud and filled her heart and brought joy and nochus, or bragging rights.

That’s the way life ought to be.  But for many of us it isn’t.  We don’t have the presence of mind to communicate lies or secrets in our relationships.  We choose, perhaps unconsciously, to accumulate psychic clutter, the unexamined and often unconscious material in our psyches that saps our aliveness and limits our effectiveness, rather than share it with the ones with whom we’re involved.  What stops us from being able to communicate?  Aren’t these often the most important people in our lives.  And, yet, we suffer not only in life but at their passing. 

At the break-up of a relationship our dreams for that relationship are the hardest to let go.  It is often not the person that we miss.  Instead it is our dreams for the future with that person that we mourn.  Even if those dreams are, in fact, totally unrealistic, the loss of those dreams causes us pain.  It might be helpful to go inside and look for our accumulation of psychic clutter. 

Where have we withheld our love rather than to communicate -- perhaps a painful incident?  What biting remark did we make on the playground as a child that still keeps intruding into our consciousness?  Have we a list of items that we thought weren’t important enough to communicate to our loved one.  But they don’t go away.

Withholding always produces consequences.  We need to uncover, re-visit and then discard these items.  Then we’ll be free.  Really free to live the lives that we were intended to live.

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