On Unforgiveness and Losing a Friend

“I broke our friendship the way a child steps backwards and bumps, so innocently and so fatefully, into an irreplaceable china vase, knocking it over.”

By Winnie Lui | Twitter: @INTELsashimi

I relate very well to the song lyrics of “How to Save a Life,” by The Fray:

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend / Somewhere along in the bitterness

And I would have stayed up with you all night / Had I known how to save a life.

The song speaks of a broken friendship and a fruitless meeting between estranged friends, who fail to come back together, leaving the speaker with disappointed wondering.

When most people talk about broken relationships and the resulting bitterness, they refer to the difficulty–and the importance–of forgiving others. The person who holds grudges, I’m advised, hurts herself most. But what if I’m the object of another’s bitterness?

Forgiving, Forgiven?

Recently, I was at a small group discussion, and the topic was releasing resentments. The leader went around the table and asked us each in turn to share our thoughts and current struggles. The lady across from me broke into tears during her story. “What if I forgive,” she asked, “and this person keeps repeating her hurtful actions?” The group talked around her point and offered comforting words and helpful suggestions.

Then the leader turned to me, “Who do you have trouble forgiving?” she asked. I searched my slow, after-lunch brain. “Um, I can’t think of anyone in my recent memory,” I started, “but I feel I’m the one who’s unforgiven.”

Have you ever lost a friend, the way you lose many pages of precious work on a Word document that you forgot to save when your computer crashed? It was your fault for not saving your work early, but that technological meltdown was also unexpected and outside your control. That’s how I felt after I’d lost my friend. It was completely unintentional, and yet somehow still the result of my foolishness.

After the unhappy ending, I still didn’t know what exactly I’d done wrong. I’d apologized. I thought we would be fine again. But we weren’t. I’ve never gotten over that.

Losing a Friend

It’s sad to lose something beautiful. It’s infuriating that I had done nothing knowingly, had held no intentions to destroy and reserved no schemes for betrayal. Yet I broke our friendship the way a child steps backwards and bumps, so innocently and so fatefully, into an irreplaceable china vase, knocking it over.

In the fallout, I have offered so many repair attempts and reconciliation gestures. But I think the time has passed for repair. It seems I am naïve to believe that everything can be fixed and restored to original conditional. I console myself by saying that some things are not meant to be.

I comfort myself by thinking that my friend and I now each have our own separate and full lives. Even though our connection is past, we are both doing well in our own spheres. It still hurts when I see her from time to time, and we are like strangers.

Sometimes, misunderstandings are catastrophic. Yet I still have hope that time may reshape the mountains of difference between her and me, and bring us back together, free of hurt, judgment or fear.

Questions:

• What about you?
• Is there someone who holds you in unforgiveness?
• Is there someone you have difficulty forgiving?
• How do you deal with it?

About Winnie:

The wave of Asian immigration in the 1990s brought Winnie to Canada on a little red-mast junk. To fulfill her family’s dream of running a business in Hong Kong and giving the children a Western education, Winnie’s father commuted home to Canada during Christmas and Chinese New Year, and Winnie herself spent her childhood between the two continents and among many different schools and neighbourhoods. Her growing up experience has become a mosaic of cultures, languages, and perspectives. Winnie blogs at intellectualsashimi.com and tweets @intelSASHIMI

Photo credit: No entrance, by Mattox