We Had Already Chosen Her Room

You had decided which room was hers.

Not out loud, maybe. But you had walked through it on the second viewing and stood in the small one at the back with the window over the garden and thought: that one. And then, on the way home in the car, you said something about the light in the mornings, and neither of you said what you were actually doing, and both of you knew.

Then the call came and it had gone to somebody else.

And what you said was: oh well. What you said was that these things happen, and that another one will come along, and that you were not going to get upset about a house.

And then you went and did something in another room for a while.

I want to say the thing nobody will say to you, because everybody who loves you will say the other thing.

You lost something.

Not a transaction. Not an opportunity. You had begun to live in that house in your head, and the living was real, and the removal of it is a loss, and you are allowed to grieve it without anybody first agreeing that it qualifies.

And I know exactly what has been said to you this week, because it is the same everywhere.

It was not meant to be. God has something better. If it had been right it would have worked out. Everything happens for a reason.

Every one of those was said kindly. And every one of them, underneath, is doing the same job: it is asking you to stop being sad, quickly, by explaining the loss away.

I am not going to do that. I am not going to tell you what it meant.

Hope deferred

There is a line in Proverbs that names this exactly, and the fact that it is in scripture at all is most of what you need.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12, King James Version)

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.

Read what that sentence is doing, because it is not offering comfort. It is making an observation, and it is a clinical one.

It says that hoping for something and not getting it does a particular kind of damage. Not disappointment. Sickness. The word chosen is about a body being unwell, and the location given is the heart.

And notice what the verse does not do.

It does not tell you to stop hoping in order to protect yourself. It does not say the deferral was for your good. It does not explain. It does not add a clause about how the sickness is working something in you or teaching you patience.

It states the fact and moves on.

That is scripture treating a disappointed hope as a genuine injury, in plain language, without a lesson attached. And there is something in that which the kind things people have said to you this week do not have: it does not require you to feel better in order to be right about it.

Your heart is sick. That is the correct description and it is in the book.

You are carrying an injury that scripture names plainly, and a disappointed hope has never once needed a lesson attached to be real. Proverbs 13:12 calls it sickness and offers no explanation for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stays with somebody without needing the loss to have meant something.

You are not being foolish

Here is the part I think you actually need, because I suspect the grief is not the hardest thing this week.

The hardest thing is that you feel silly for minding.

It was a building. You never owned it. Nothing was taken from you that you had, and legally and financially you are precisely where you were a month ago, and you know all of that, and it has not helped at all.

So let me tell you why you mind, because it is not irrational and you should stop treating it as though it were.

You did not lose a house. You lost a version of your life.

For a few weeks you had a place to put things. Where the table would go. What Sunday mornings would be like. Where a child would sleep and what she would see out of the window. Every one of those was a small act of imagination and every one of them was, briefly, real to you.

And when the call came, none of the bricks moved. What ended was the imagined life, and that was a thing you had actually built, and its removal is the loss.

That is why the size of it surprises you. You are not grieving in proportion to a property. You are grieving in proportion to what you had already lived.

What you lost was a life you had already begun to live, and the size of it has never once been out of proportion to that. The written word calls a deferred hope a sickness without asking anybody to justify the feeling, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with two people who feel foolish for minding.

Say it once, and add nothing

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the whole of it.

Say out loud to one person that you are disappointed, without adding anything after it.

One person. Your partner counts, and may be the best choice, because there is a reasonable chance you have both been being brave in front of each other.

Say the sentence: I am really disappointed about that house.

And then stop.

Do not add but it is fine. Do not add I know another one will come. Do not add I am being silly about it. Do not add I know it is only a house, and above all do not add the sentence about it not being meant to be, because you have already said that one to about four people this week and you did not believe it any of the times.

Every one of those additions is a retraction. It takes the sentence back in the same breath, and it tells the other person that no response is required, and so nothing lands anywhere and you are still carrying it.

The bare sentence is much harder to say than you think. Try it and notice how strongly your mouth wants to keep going.

And what usually happens, when somebody manages the bare version, is that the other person does not fix it. They say something small, or nothing much, and there is a short silence, and that silence is the first place this has actually been put down since the call.

You are able to say it and stop, and every addition afterward has never once been anything but a retraction. Proverbs 13:12 states the sickness without softening it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in the short silence after somebody says a bare sentence.