I will check out the link. Thanks.

Sometimes, words have to be created to convey just the right nuance of what we mean to say. “Un-erased” was the only right nuance I could find.

After that Christmas, someone asked what had happened to me that had so profoundly shaken me. I looked down and whispered, “I was dis-existed.”

I’ve never heard the word “un-erased” before. It seems impossible, but how poignant. But I guess that’s what healing can be– repairing what seems entirely broken. I know how powerful it is when what someone says or does brings you out of ‘the woodwork,’ so to speak. And I’m glad this has helped. The first quote of mine that you mentioned wasn’t mine originally. A friend put it like that, and I wanted to pass it on. I hope that your friend was able to share herself, too. I have so much faith in healing that happens here, now. And it’s devastating when there’s even the possibility of pain and suffering left over. And, we’ll never know. God, I don’t even know what to do with it. Honestly, it’s something I don’t like to think about myself. It feels too hard to look at that seeming hopelessness in the face.

I’m still thinking through what prayer can do for me and for people who aren’t in my life presently. I know it’s a mystery, but it’s something I want to lean into more.

What that person did to you in unbelievable, infuriating. What betrayal. It seems almost unreal. I can’t say anything about the other person; I don’t know them. But, they must be very weak. You must be very sad. I want to believe in the church as a community, though I’m not quite sure what that means.

Here’s a link that I go back to from time to time because it’s been a huge help in helping me understand reconciliation, what living with people, friends, family actually means– especially when no complete repair can ever happen. http://www.incommunion.org/2005/08/03/living-in-communion/

Forgiveness has less to do with the other person. You can forgive that person even without, and especially without, their apology. It’s about repairing the cycle– starting with yourself. (By you, I mean people in general).

Thank you so much for writing all of this. You are brave. Feel free to write more.

You wrote: “Death is scary and uncomfortable, but it is part of the world we live in. To face death is to face ourselves — our deepest fears of isolation, lost-ness, of not being enough, of the unknown. We often sin because we’re afraid of death. We run away and we hide.”

When I read those words, I realized that you had articulated for me what has haunted me about my friend’s death, albeit with perhaps an inadvertent twist.

I didn’t know until after she died that her husband had committed suicide a few years before, leaving her alone with their four children. And then she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and when I look at the last photo that was taken of her, I wonder with deep anxiety and grief if she ever got to talk about all of those things I can see in her dark eyes. I wonder and feel the angst every day.

It isn’t that she died without people around her. No, her wonderful parents were there, as were the children and others. It isn’t even that I know for certain – but I wonder if my friend was ever allowed by anyone to talk of her soul, her fears, her exasperation with life. I wonder if she felt that she needed to “spare” the others, and I wonder if they were afraid to ask, afraid to listen, afraid to hear. “We often sin because we’re afraid of death. We run away and we hide.”

And that is the most alone way we leave people to die. We can be bedside, and leave people so utterly alone.

I am not the type to have done that – I knew her my entire life and would have busted right in with, “Tell me about what I see in your eyes.” She may or may not have done so, but that’s hardly the point.

My sickening fear is that nobody ever thought to ask.

The other thing you wrote that was very meaningful to me was, “Even now, sometimes I feel that prayer is the only way I can connect with someone who is still alive though not in my life right now.”

About 5.5 years ago, someone whom I thought was a close Christian friend invited me to come for Christmas several hundred miles away. I went, only to discover that after apparently feigning excited anticipation of my visit, this person had actually been planning to harm me. The plan was successful, both physically and in terms of sheer psychic pain. I was distraught, terrified and deeply grieved.

There was never any attempted reconciliation on the other person’s part. I practically begged for it because I did not want the gnawing unresolve, the bad goodbye, the simple and abrupt deletion of my existence, and the horror of having to confess to non-Christians that, yes, the bruises on me were inflicted with deliberation by a professing Christian.

Years later, I am ashamed to have to confess that, no, that professing Christian never made a single attempt – NONE – to fix what was so unsuspectingly and viciously shattered.

I was angry, but far, far more anguished, that any Christian would think that they had any right at all to simply erase my existence and start the morrow with a “clean slate.” If the recipient of the erasure happened to care about you, then you committed a kind of murder.

Your words about using prayer to “connect” with the living who cannot be or do not want to be in your life now were the first words I’ve read in 5.5 years that made me realize that I do not have to remain bound to the excruitiating chains in which this person sent me away, and because of prayer, neither does it mean that I have no other choice but to keep choking on the abandonment. Through prayer, I can bring this person back into my life without the hurting humiliation of this person’s refusal – because I don’t have to ask permission, and I don’t need cooperation.

I guess you could say that your words “un-erased” me.