Turn The Page

Slamming the door, once and for all, on “closure”

I saw it again last night, on some show called Missing Person on one of the Discovery© channels. Some kid in Arizona got kicked out of a drug treatment center and, high on methamphetamine, wandered several miles out into the desert. His family was distraught, but hopeful. The search and rescue team finally found him four days later, bruised and battered and riddled with frostbite (the desert out there can get pretty cold at night.) And very dead. In his delirium he had discarded his clothing, and ended up dying of exposure.

But sure enough, when they found him, one of the search and rescue guys said, “Well, at least this will give his family some closure.”

Look, I’ve never lost someone that close to me in such a horrific way, and certainly not a child, but is knowing the person is dead more comforting than not knowing? Okay, probably so. Does having that person’s physical body to look at and then put in the ground ease one’s pain more so than never finding them at all? Well, almost surely. But what has any of this to do with closure?

‘Closure’ appears to be one of those buzzwords seemingly everyone uses but no one can really define. I don’t know when it came into popular usage, exactly, or where it came from. I woke up one day and – crap – it was out there everywhere. What does ‘closure’ mean, exactly? The implication is the that family and friends of the dead person can now shut the door on their rawest grief, and begin to move on. Is that what happens? Or is finding the body just another in a set of awful facts one has to process in the hopes of eventually being able to live, with some sense of equanimity, with the death of their loved one, and the facts surrounding it?

I am all for relief from grief, especially from death, and I am not prepared to argue the validity or value of some kind of closure-type thing in these sorts of instances. But ‘closure’ is used in all kinds of situations that shouldn’t be as traumatic as losing someone close. I have heard of people who need closure in every situation from losing a pet to breaking up with one’s “significant other” (another cutesy word/phrase that mildly pisses me off) to failing to draw to an inside straight with a lot of money invested a big pot to losing one’s favorite ball-point pen last Friday.

I hope I am not the only one to think this is mostly crazy. For one thing, closure – if there even is such a thing – is not something one can dial up and use, whenever necessary. As I understand it, closure or something like it is pretty elusive. And I think someone who would need it to recover from any of life’s everyday indignities, or “little deaths”, as I like to call them (anything from a broken relationship to your favorite team losing the big game or series, roughly), probably has some psychological issues they need to be dealing with before they even worry about resolving things through closure.

For most of us, most times, I suspect rather than ‘closure’, about the best we can hope for is for our wounds to scab up and eventually cover with scar tissue. The emotional trauma is not really gone, it’s just been just patched up and moved aside so one can resume functioning in a more or less normal manner. For one example, it is hard for me to imagine anyone ever putting a traumatic romantic breakup completely behind them. I know personally if you talked to me about, oh, I don’t know – let’s say Janet, the girl who dumped me for another guy back in 7th grade, it probably wouldn’t be too hard for me to churn up some of the pain from that episode still, even 30+ years later. And let’s not even bring up some of the subsequent disasters from high school and college and young bachelorhood.

I distinctly remember one particularly pathetic episode from when I was about 21. I had fallen in love with the wrong girl again, and when we split up I was typically traumatized. So my solution, and I remember reasoning my way to this very deliberately, was to purchase a half gallon of Jack Daniels Black Label, and every evening after work I would mix myself drinks of JD and water on ice and drink them while listening to The Who’s Quadrophenia LP turned up really loud (“Love, Reign O’er Me” used to just kill me, every time) and writing sloppy, bad poetry; while my roommate would be there looking on as if I were hopeless.

But you know what? It worked, in a manner of speaking. After about a week of this self-abuse and wallowing in self-pity, the fever broke, so to speak, and I was able to pick myself up and fling myself back into the social milieu, as it were.

This solution sprang at least partly I am sure from a personal belief I think I have always had – that the only way to deal with trouble is not to run and/or hide from it, but rather to jump into it and immerse oneself in it completely. If it does not do one in, one comes out better on the other side of it. But the problem with trying to drink away trouble is, first of all, there is a lot of ancillary damage. You can kill millions of useful brain cells just for starters, trying to get at the ones that make you feel socially inadequate and like a complete loser. Also, temporary alcoholism causes one’s friends to look on with pity and/or derision or worse, and of course contributes nothing toward getting to a real solution, such as another woman, for instance.

Also, whatever the problem is usually comes back, eventually. The old Southern adage that ‘the blues don’t swim, but they float’ applies here. You can try to drown your troubles, but just when you think you are in the clear, up they pop again. I used to think of my busted up relationships as dinosaurs out in California during the Cretaceous Period. Yep, that’s right. Dinosaurs. See, they got pushed or fell into these tar pits out there around west L.A., near Hollywood maybe, and then they were gone forever, surely. Except eons later, the bones starting coming back up to the surface. . .

The problem with walking away from emotional trauma and just letting chemicals and eventually time scar over the wound and leave a cicatrix on the heart and mind is that the trauma is still basically unresolved, and will come back to haunt one eventually; usually several years on and when least expected. That is the opposite of what closure is, I am fairly certain.

But while these common, everyday things we speak of are painful, they are not nearly as profoundly painful as what the family on Missing Person were going through. Whatever they need to ease that pain and make sense of what caused it, I am all for it. As I am all for not trivializing dealing with real pain by using the same catchy word or phrase or concept ascribed to dealing with it as a prescription for dealing with every possible adverse situation, from the mildly significant to the trivial.

“Closure” should be the etymological equivalent of medicinal morphine, to be used in only the most gravely painful situations. The rest of the time, I am sorry to say, you will just have to figure a way to muddle along with the rest of us.