Death protocols

There are many different types of death. There’s the death of a dream. The death of a friendship. The regular corporeal death which signals the cessation of existence in this material plane. The latter has clear expectations, protocols and procedures in place to deal with it, but the others? Not so much.

I have decided that for my own sanity, there are people whom I need to consider to be dead, even if they are very much alive and well. Before you go categorising me as a stone-cold psychopath, let me explain why this is necessary and why I need to sort out my own set of protocols for this mental death.

Those that are close to me know that I grew up in an emotionally turbulent environment where reactions were unpredictable, nothing was safe and anything could go from A-OK to screaming drama at the drop of a very tiny hat. At the age of 21, I started the long and arduous process of disengaging from this toxic attachment after I left home. It took me a few years to reach the conclusion that their inability to react in emotionally regulated and predictable ways were not due to my failure to explain things clearly and logically enough. It’s just how things were. At age 26, I got married to my first husband, moved to Taiwan and felt an absolute release from the twisting vines of fear, obligation and guilt.

This state of affairs lasted 12 years before, for reasons of optimism and genuine curiosity, I got back in contact. The rationale was I was a fully grown adult with life experience and thousands of hours of therapy under my belt. I’d survived a divorce, moved countries, and grown a whole lot. If it had any chance of working, now was the time.

Reader, it did not work out. I was told by these people that they wished to (re)end their relationship with me and that I was a particularly evil brand of human being.

So what’s the issue? Well, you see, the issue is that despite extreme proclamations at the time of never wanting to see or hear from me again, these people have a particularly puzzling case of amnesia. I have received one birthday present, one Christmas present and one especially weird request for a favour in the 19 months since that happened. Oh and a phone call to “apologise, even though we have no idea what went wrong”. When it comes to forgiving and forgetting, it’s more a heavy case of forgetting.

If they had cut me off and stayed away, all would be well. However, I have this troubling case of being haunted from the edges of my life by these people who I know with a withering certainty will absolutely hurt me again should I let them back in. And so, we come to the need to consider these people not actually dead, as I don’t wish any harm to anyone, but mentally dead to me.

Step one: The obvious - ensure all avenues of contact that exist are cut off or blocked.

Step two: Know what I am going to do should contact emerge from unexpected quarters.
a) The door knock: I can see who is at the front door from my deck, so if it’s them I will not answer. In case of a sit-in, I will send Dan in all his burliness to deal with it.
b) The postal invasion: I recognise the handwriting, so I will throw it away without opening. This will be tough as I will be curious, but you can’t read letters from dead people.
c) The proxy: If anyone attempts to contact me on their behalf, I will gently but firmly tell them that I don’t need their services as a medium.

Step three: Expunge all mementos
This will involve deleting all emails, removing photos, and throwing away/donating anything that has any connection to them.

Step four: Grieve?
After making sure all this haunting from the edges can no longer disrupt my life, it will be time to grieve. The what could have been but wasn’t. The what I should have had but didn’t. The what they could have been but weren’t.

Thus begins the process of considering these people mentally dead to me. It’s a mixed bag of emotions but I need to do something to stop myself wasting time and energy on anger and sadness. It’s time to call time on it and move on and start focusing on the many splendid things around me instead of the howling black hole of nothing that is the reality of this once-relationship.

RIP.