I’m out with the girls and a friend dismisses another friend’s pain.
“What’s the big deal?” she asks. “She’s the one who left him.”
“Just because someone chooses to leave,” I say. “Doesn’t mean there isn’t grief.”
I left my husband. No more chaos, arguing, and pain. The weight of the world could seek a new shoulder to lean on. But then a sadness crept in.
If the ache of divorce distresses us, you could say narcissism deludes us.
Each comes with a contradictory cost.
One is a forthright loss and the other a deceptive loss.
You mourn the person you believed to exist and the one who never did.
It’s a complicated casualty.
It reminds me of an adage in the Alzheimer’s community. “You lose them twice. Once while they are still living and again when they pass.”
You lose a narcissist twice.
The person you imagined and the person who exists.
You are forced to grieve them both.
There’s no escaping it.
It’s not the illusion of grief.
It’s what I call illusionary grief.
The narcissist has forced the one you love to extinction. But you believe they existed. So you mourn them.
Despite the illusion.
While I was losing my mom to Alzheimer’s, I gazed at the physical representation of my mother. But the woman who raised me was gone. Her body endured, her beautiful essence had vanished.
She was there and not there.
It was an anguishing living loss.
I could see her but I could no longer experience her.
Without interaction, you become separate from the moment. You aren’t in it, you are watching it. I think because the heart rejects it. It’s too excruciating to see the presence of someone you love without the soul of who they are.
I loved a man who turned out to be a narcissist.
The man I loved was real.
He existed for more years than not, if only to me.
We spent college together, got married, built a business, bought a house, and raised gorgeous children. My family and friends became his and his family and friends became mine. Our physical, emotional, and spiritual beings were irrevocably intertwined.
Or so I thought.
But I had married two people.
A man and a narcissist.
The man was a physical illusion and the narcissist a reality.
First, I grieved the man.
It was violent mourning. Tears pillaging my face. Sleeplessness to the point of deprivation. Denial to the point of internal exhaustion.
I refused to accept he was gone.
But he was.
Now I would grieve the narcissist.
He was easier to mourn.
The figment of my emotional imagination.
Not unlike the long goodbye of Alzheimer’s, I had been slowly preparing for this inevitable passing. I had cried, worried, and screamed. I had resisted and fought it.
I dreaded losing what was left of the man.
Or accepting the presence of someone I loved without a soul of who I thought they were. I gazed at the physical representation of the narcissist but the man I loved was gone.
I could see him but no longer experience him.
He was there and not there.
An anguishing living loss.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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