What I'm trying to say is, we were young once. And your friends one day will grow up and become as gormless as we are. They will lose that one thing they have now.
What is it?
Your friends meet you where you are.
Where else can they meet me?
Yes, but think of what extraordinary courage they profess to meet you where you are. We grownups tend to get stuck with a fact, and for many people you have become a fact. Hard to accept. Impossible to understand. Still, you are a fact and that is how they will prefer to think of you and remember you now.
Not me, but my death, he said.
Important correction, my dear.
What do people do when they can't accept something they don't understand?
They ask, How could that happen? What went wrong? Or they say that even in the direst situation, there is a bright side if we let words like love and hope work their magic.
Does that bother you?
No.
Why not?
Because people who know you and people who know me meet us where we are. People who don't know you and people who don't know me are only facts. Flawed or limited, whichever adjective you prefer.
Just as we are flawed facts for them.
Exactly, I said.
Do facts meet then?
In fairy tales, I said, but not in this life.
Or in any life, Nikolai said.
Holly Margl is the award-winning author of Witnessing Grief; Inviting Trauma and Loss to Our Coaching Conversations, An Enneagram Perspective, coach, coach mentor, and trainer specializing in grief, trauma, and the Enneagram.
