Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Closure brings the past around full circle

By Carl Heintze

Psychologists call it "closure." Lay people have no equivalent term, yet everyone has the need for it at some time in their lives. It's the process of reconciliation by which we come full circle from something or someone we've met in the past.

It's the process that drives veterans to return to the scene of battles, as, for instance, Vietnam or World War II. I don't know exactly what veterans are seeking through such closure, but they seem to search for it. The same need drives those who come to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., to touch the names on The Wall, names of those they knew and loved. Indeed, I once sought closure from war myself, 25 years after World War II ended.

I had no wall to touch in memory of a lost friend, but I did find and stand before his grave in the Netherlands. Somehow it helped. The process reconciled me to his death; it allowed me finally to accept loss. We need to do this, we need somehow to touch the past, to know that it's there, even as we know the present exists.

In the same way, after our parents have died, we are required to make periodic trips to the cemetery to place flowers on their graves. It's not just mourning, it also is a reassurance that they existed.

Somehow returning to a place where we knew great events helps us understand them. Otherwise, we're stuck with this odd or sometimes terrible sense of being unfinished, incomplete, almost as if a hand or finger were missing.

In a real sense, closure is making a circle, doubling back to a beginning and making the circle finally full. And sometimes it takes a long time, years, even a lifetime.

But not all closures result from such traumatic events as war. Many involve close personal relationships; divorce, for instance.

For many divorced people, there is the need to see again the other person in the equation, to have closure with the broken past, to put a scar on the open wound of separation so that if there is not exactly reconciliation, at least there is healing.

I don't know why closure is so necessary or exactly how it works, but it does. I know because I've experienced both short- and long-term closure. The short-term closure was with a friend whom I had unintentionally, but nevertheless certainly, wounded with words. It was one of those occasions when I knew as soon as they were out of my mouth that they were the wrong words to say. I wished immediately I could suck them back down my throat as easily as I expelled them.

But, of course, I couldn't. The person I had wronged, however unintentionally, had reason to be angry and hurt. I realized with a sort of paralysis that I couldn't make immediate amends, but as soon as I got home I wrote a letter apologizing and hoping for the best.

A couple of days later we met again, shook hands, hugged, even wiped a tear or two away and we both felt better. Indeed, we seemed to have reached a new level of understanding we hadn't had before. We'd made closure.

The second occasion was more long-lasting--years, in fact--and involved a whole range of emotions centered around a single event. For a long time, we didn't talk or write or communicate except through others. During the years that passed, eventually a tentative kind of relationship was gradually established. It was delicate, even fragile, but we both worked at it and slowly it got stronger.

Finally, after four years we met again, and while it wasn't exactly yesterday again, it didn't take long for us to get back to many things that we had shared before. The gap between us was bridged.

We both knew it would never be exactly the same between us, but maybe that was good. Maybe in mulling over what had happened before, we were able to revive the best parts of our relationship and discard the bad vibrations. We, too, had made a closure, reconnecting the severed ties we once had shared.

We both felt immensely better, I think. I say "I think" because we are still handling one another gingerly, afraid what we've reestablished may once again come apart.

It's sad that for many no closure is possible. Sometimes death cannot be overcome and sometimes the wounds in divorce or in other severed relationships are too deep ever to heal.

The late Adlai Stevenson once said "There isn't a single quarrel that cannot be overcome with time."

He was speaking of international quarrels, but he was right. Time can and does heal, and closure does arrive, whether fast or slow. Eventually the circle does finally and certainly close.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.