A Murder, Grief, and How My Middle-School Self Doesn't Want To Go Away

This story began for me in middle school and circles back, 40 years later, when a murder occurred that has me standing face-to-face with my 7th-grade self and wondering, what did I miss?

Last week, a woman my son dated was murdered by a man she didn’t know who came into her place of work and stabbed her to death.

I got the news from a mutual friend, and my first reaction was shocked and sobbing: for the insanity, the permanence, the road ahead for her family, the sadness for my son, even though they hadn’t been together in some time.

But last night, after they arrested the suspect, I started reflecting on the heaviness in me. Grief, I’ve noticed, has at least two categories.  The first is the deep missing of a person or creature that you loved hard, that was a force in our lives, and we miss and grieve for their presence.

The second kind of grief is from the death of hope: the realization that something that might have happened now is never going to. This grief is the hot, sticky place where we lose a friend or family member we were distanced or even estranged from, and we know: now we will never have a happy ending to that story. This grief flavors divorce: the stark reality that this is not, in fact, the person you will grow old with, and that any hopes you had for the partnership are burned to the ground.

It’s the place we mourn lost opportunities.

I spent a fair amount of time with this young woman over the 3 years she was in my son’s life.  And my grief lives in both categories.  I am so, so sad for her life cut short, for the fear she must have felt, for her beloved family and those whose lives will never feel okay again without her.

But the learning for me lives in that second category: it’s about how little I got to know her. She was shy, and I can name this now: as I look back at that time – and without feeling proud of myself at all – I took that personally. 

She struck me as “aloof,” and something about that convinced me, back then, that she was disinterested in me.  And I realize, as I talk about this terrible thing that happened, that I describe her every time as a beautiful young woman. Which she was. But if I get curious about why that’s my word, I realize there is some junior high still living in me, some energetic insecurity that had me not doing my best with her.

That version of me, the one who landed, apparently, in my “less than” box in the presence of a beautiful and “aloof” woman – the kind I was terrified of in middle school – would have claimed with certainty: she wasn’t interested in getting to know me, in talking, in connecting deeply or opening up to me. And that felt super true to me in middle school – and what I did as a 13-year-old was to withdraw.

And that’s what I did again, apparently, as an adult with my inner middle schooler in charge. Because this stuff is slippery.

As I look back, I cringe. I cringe because that reactive middle schooler still lives in me and rears her head on occasion.  I cringe with the way I wasn’t more skilled in that relationship with my son’s girlfriend – I abandoned my grown-up self – and I cringe with how much I made up about her that had no basis in who she really was.

And today I grieve the knowledge that I could have done better and didn’t – and now won’t.

So I challenge you: who is in your life that your inner middle schooler has written off, but that you might do better with? How might you show up differently, as more of a grown up, in a relationship that triggers you and brings out a version you aren’t proud of?

Where might you be operating from anxiety or insecurity, instead of love and curiosity? As I was reminded of again this week: life is uncertain and can change on a dime.