Help! My recently widowed sister wants me to confront her past, for her. My sister, 63, was with her husband, 67, since she was 16 (they got married in their 20s). As sometimes happens to widows/widowers, she is now questioning their relationship. He was unfaithful to her several times, but she chose to stay (they have three grown children.)
One of his possible indiscretions was with a childhood friend of mine, with whom I’ve had sporadic contact over the years. Recently the friend contacted me, out of blue, to have dinner together. Neither my sister nor I know if anything actually happened between them, and her husband always denied it. This was in the 1980s.
My sister is now asking me to ask my friend for the details of the affair. My instinct says: no way. I told her I don’t know how this will help heal her past hurts. She thinks it will, so she can “move on” with her life and not “live in the past”. My sister and I are very close. I thought if the subject happened to come up in conversation, and my friend told me anything sordid, I would possibly lie to my sister. As much as I love her, her past is not for me to sort out. And yes, I did tell her that gently. What to do?
Eleanor says: It amplifies grief terribly to have to question things when the beloved isn’t around to reassure. Sometimes this can become preoccupying, almost a way of keeping them alive: one more interaction, a bit more to sort out, the story isn’t over.
I agree that this isn’t yours to investigate or sort out. But I also see why your sister might feel that it is. Infidelity is a funny beast like that: it can feel so cataclysmic and world-ending to be on the receiving end of, that it’s surprising to discover everyone else isn’t reacting the same way. Many wronged spouses hope in vain that the unfaithful person will be fired, excommunicated or at very least lose all their friends. It can be very hard to see outside the pain and fascination it causes you, to the fact that it just doesn’t feel like that to everyone else. A guess, but these feelings may be compounded by grief – if your sister is missing him, confronting mortality, reflecting on whether their time together was “good” or “bad”.
You mention you’ve already told her you don’t want to investigate for her. Good on you. If she keeps pushing, I wonder whether you could focus on legitimating her feelings, if not her requests and action-items.
It’s true that attending to old wounds can turn us into forensic examiners of the past, picking up previous slights with tweezers, illuminating and studying them. This often comes at the expense of attention to the present, or all the things that didn’t go wrong. But equally, sometimes you have to totally feel something before you can totally let it go.
I’ve said before and I still think it’s true: we sometimes stay stuck in feelings because they’re a way of testifying to an important truth about our lives. Especially if we feel like we’re the only one acknowledging that truth, prolonging an acute feeling can be our only way of insisting “it did happen, it does matter”. And we can start to fear that if we let the feelings go, it will be as though the facts go, too – as if nobody will remember and there’ll be no witness to this important thing, if it’s not kept alive through our suffering.
Sometimes, acknowledgment from others gives relief: if others bear witness to the things that hurt us, our feelings aren’t the only monument, so we can let the feelings go.
It sounds as though your sister went through a lot in her marriage, and had to let go of many visions of how her life would look. She may be feeling all kinds of re-stirred indignation and mourning for those lost lives.
Perhaps you could make room for some of that hurt – how did the (known) infidelities affect her; does she wish she’d done anything differently? You could do so in a way that gently insists it’s a temporary stopping point on the way to letting go, and that you won’t be doing any factual digging.
Sometimes we go dusting for fingerprints hoping to produce a verdict, when really what we want is for others to understand and acknowledge why we feel the way we do. Perhaps, if you can give your sister that, you might alleviate her impulse to do the forensics.
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