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On Losses That Have an Author

A solo episode on grief, betrayal, and the business breakup that hurt more than a death in the family, from an existential sex therapist learning to say “it doesn’t feel fine to me” out loud.

Summary

On the South Rim of the Grand Canyon there is a plaque explaining that, for a little while, it was called the Big Canyon. Somebody eventually upgraded the marketing. I read that plaque at the end of a month spent struggling to name something else: the size of two losses that arrived together and refused to be weighed the way I expected.

My cousin, in a family close enough that losing him is the nearest this only child will come to losing a sibling, went in for major heart surgery and did not wake up. In the same stretch of weeks, a business partnership I had believed was also a friendship came apart, and on the way out the other person labeled me, essentially, a liability. I assumed grief would sort itself by rank. It didn’t. The business breakup had a sucker-punch quality that my cousin’s death did not, and I was almost embarrassed to notice it. Was I a terrible person who cared less about family than about a contract? So this episode asks the question underneath the embarrassment: why would the smaller loss hurt more?

The loss that has an author

I tried several words for it before one fit. Pride, maybe, or bruised ego. A professional wound dressed up as grief. Each covered a corner and missed the middle. The word that held was authorship.

Death with a capital D is impersonal. Irvin Yalom would file it among the givens of existence, the facts no one chose and no one gets to negotiate. You can rage at a given; you cannot take it personally. Losing my cousin says nothing about who I am, except that I am human and that I loved him. The business breakup was written by someone. It arrived with a reason attached, and the reason, as it was handed to me, was me: I’m getting out of this because of you.

Kenneth Doka’s phrase disenfranchised grief names the losses nobody sends a casserole for. A partnership ending belongs on that list, and so does a spouse who has stopped reaching for you and will not say why. These losses can hurt out of proportion to their size on paper, and much of the extra weight is the verdict folded inside them. Somebody decided, and the decision was about us.

Knowing does not buy you a pass

My therapy practice is the one place this year where I have felt sure of my footing; everything else I am doing as a beginner, building the plane while trying to fly it. Even so, I have trusted one skill. Pattern recognition, and the recognition of a pattern breaking, is a large part of why I am good at my work. I knew something was off with this partner long before anything was said. I asked, more than once, whether something was going on, and kept hearing the same answers. No, it’s fine. I’m just busy.

I want the Type A++ reader to hear this, because you are the one most likely to believe otherwise: knowing did not make it hurt less. Many brilliant, accomplished people treat insight as an anesthetic, as though seeing a pattern clearly should spare them from feeling it. That is brain in a jar syndrome in its most sophisticated form. The mind files the report, and the body gets the bill anyway.

What I wish I had said

Being in a relationship means accepting some form of liability. We take chances on people in love and in business, and the two risks run in parallel more often than we admit. When I went back through the emails and texts, the pattern was plain: only one of us was asking questions.

Most of us treat “it’s fine” the way we treat a check-engine light that switches itself off. We are relieved, and a little too willing to believe it. We fill the silence with stories and let it ride. I watch the same scene in couples therapy all the time: one partner says it’s fine while the other sits across the room looking miserable, and everyone agrees to pretend.

This is the sentence I wish I had used, and the one I would offer you:

I hear you saying you’re fine, and it doesn’t feel fine to me. Are you willing to explore this with me?

You are not claiming to know what is true for them. You are refusing to pretend about what is true for you. A relationship is only fine when both ends are at something like equilibrium, so if one of you feels a problem, there is a problem in the relationship. And if the answer to your question is no, that is important information.

We warn clients against running their intimate lives like a business. The reverse deserves a hearing: business could use some interpersonal basics.

A few questions to carry out of this one:

• When someone you love says “it’s fine,” what do you usually do next?
• In your closest relationship right now, who is asking the questions, and who is supplying the reassurance?
• What is actually true, not only in your life or theirs, but in the space between you?

The view from partway down

Back on the South Rim, I wanted to hike down just far enough to look back and feel caught between what was above and what was below. Octogenarians with walking sticks plowed past me as if they had done this every year of their lives. Standing that small against something that large did not collapse my problems into nothing. It let me see more of the picture, and for a moment it let me breathe. When someone else tells you there are bigger problems in the world, it tends to land as dismissal. Perspective you prescribe for yourself can be something closer to healing.

It did not resolve anything, though. At one point a deal landed in my inbox while I was reading over the draft obituary my mother had sent me. The absurdity of everyday life has rarely been so literal. The partnership ended, as I put it on the episode, about ten minutes too soon, because what followed was the thing I had been building toward all along. I am not offering that as vindication. I am still grieving my cousin and still grieving the person I was excited to build something with. You can hold grief while good things arrive. You do not get to choose the order.

Who this is for

If you have ever grieved the “wrong” loss hardest and wondered what that says about you, or been told “it’s fine” by someone whose face said otherwise, this episode is for you. It is also for anyone building something new while the rest of life keeps colliding with it at ninety-degree angles.

The question to leave with

Who in your life has recently told you everything is fine, and what would it cost you to say, out loud, that it doesn’t feel fine over here?

Moments Worth Noting

Death isn’t personal.

The business death, that loss, it had an author.

Sometimes I think that we think when we know things, that somehow gives us a pass from the emotional pain. And it doesn’t.

Being in a relationship means accepting some form of liability.

You’re only refusing to pretend about what is true for you.

Chapters

• 00:00 — Why this episode, and owning what you don’t know yet
• 02:24 — Arizona, dimes, and rainbows
• 04:47 — A rainbow out of the canyon (and the Big Canyon’s branding problem)
• 07:07 — Hiking down to feel caught between above and below
• 09:22 — Perspective you prescribe for yourself
• 11:49 — Nobody teaches therapists to run a business
• 14:12 — When something feels off and you keep hearing “it’s fine”
• 16:18 — Two losses at once
• 18:42 — Why the business loss hurt more: the loss with an author
• 21:22 — Relationship as accepted liability
• 23:05 — “I hear you saying you’re fine”: what I wish I had said
• 25:11 — Refusing to pretend, and a door closing
• 27:23 — A deal in the inbox, an obituary on the screen
• 27:36 — Signing off from the middle of the mess

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The Receipts

• Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy — the foundational text on death and the other givens of existence.
• Kenneth J. Doka (ed.), Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow — on losses the culture does not recognize as losses.
• Grand Canyon National Park, South Rim — https://www.nps.gov/grca/