Nobody Ever Called It Off

There was never a last one. That is what she keeps stumbling on when she tries to think about it.

Six of them, every Tuesday, for five years. The same front room, the same low table, the same absurd argument about which biscuits, and about ninety minutes that were the honest part of most of their weeks.

Then something came, and it came to some of them and not others, and nothing bad happened at all. Nobody said anything sharp. Nobody accused anybody. What happened was that one Tuesday somebody could not make it, and two weeks later two of them could not, and then it moved to a Thursday for a while, and then somebody suggested picking it up after the summer.

That was four years ago.

They are all still friendly. She sees three of them regularly and likes them as much as she ever did. Every so often one of them says it would be lovely to get everybody back round, and everybody agrees warmly, and nothing is arranged.

She cannot grieve it, because there is no it. Nothing ended. Nobody left. And a thing that was the honest part of five years of her life is gone, and she is not sure she has the right to miss something that nobody ever called off.

If yours dissolved without anybody deciding, come and sit down. Nobody in that room is going to be blamed for the diary here.

An ending is still an ending without an announcement

Let us be plain about what she has been denying herself, because the denial is the injury and not the drift.

Something ended. It ended in the way most true things end, which is not with a decision but with a series of ordinary Tuesdays that each seemed unimportant on their own. The absence of an announcement does not make it a smaller loss. It makes it an unattended one.

And there is a second thing she has been doing, quietly, which is treating the drift as her own failure of diligence, as though a better woman would have kept six adult lives in one front room by force of will.

You did not let this slide. Nothing about an ending with no announcement has ever made it less real or made it yours to have prevented. I am not saying that to excuse anybody. Scripture says I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine own heart: and my spirit made diligent search (Psalm 77:6), which is a person deliberately looking back at what was, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a woman four years after a Tuesday nobody knew was the last one.

Looking back is treated as work, not weakness

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it puts nothing on any of the five.

Read what the psalmist is doing in that verse, because the language is surprisingly strenuous.

I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine own heart: and my spirit made diligent search.Psalm 77:6

Diligent search. That is effort, deliberately applied, aimed backwards. He is not being told to move on and he is not scolded for dwelling. The remembering is presented as something a person does on purpose, with attention.

And notice he is searching for a song, which is to say for something he actually had. The psalm does not treat that as sentimentality. It treats it as evidence being gathered.

You are allowed to look back on purpose, and Scripture calls that searching diligent rather than indulgent. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman with an empty Tuesday.

Nobody in that group is being blamed

Something must be said very plainly, or this quietly becomes a complaint about five people with jobs and children.

They did not drop her. Every one of them had a life that was busy in a real way, and the ones who could not make those first few Tuesdays had actual reasons, and the warmth when they see each other now is not a performance. The thing that came did not land the same in every one of them, and nobody in that room has ever held that against anybody else.

And she was not careless either.

This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of you was wrong. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18), where the qualifier admits that six diaries were never inside one woman's control, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a verdict on who stopped answering first, who lets her keep them and keep the grief.

And if these four years have cost more than the friends in that room know, if sleep has gone, if Tuesdays have started to be difficult, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.