There is one kind of pain for which nobody has yet devised a cure—the pain that comes from the ending of a relationship. The relationship—it can be a marriage, a love affair, or a deep friendship, in fact, any emotional bond between two people—may have come to an abrupt but premeditated end, or it may have simply fizzled out as people and circumstances change. You may have been the one to break it off, or you may have been on the receiving end a brief phone call, a "Dear John" letter such as soldiers at the front used to dread receiving from their girlfriends back home who had got tired of waiting, or simply a quiet fading away. (66) Although there is no cure for grief, we cannot help looking for one to ease the pain, and help us forget our tears. We seek refuge in other relationships, keep ourselves busy with work, try to immerse ourselves in our hobbies. Perhaps we start to drink a little more than is good for us to "drown our sorrows", or
A. Some bury their grief deep inside themselves so that few realize what they are going through; others seek relief by pouring their hearts out to their friends, or to anyone else who is prepared to offer a sympathetic shoulder to lean on. But even our friends after a while start to show their irritation, and suggest with their reproachful glances that it is about time we stopped our crying. They, too, are in a hurry for the thing to be over.
B. The future stretches endlessly and bleakly ahead of you: you are utterly alone and without hope of consolation. Even after many, many months, when you think that you have begun to learn to live without your lost love, something—a familiar place, a snatch of music, a whiff of perfume, a casual work—will suddenly bring the bittersweet memories flooding back. You choke back the tears and the desperate, almost angry feeling that you are no better now than the day the affair ended.
C. The important thing to admit about grief is that it will take its time. By trying to convince ourselves that it ought to be over sooner, we create an additional tension which can only aggravate the condition. People who have gone through the agony of a broken relationship—and there must be few who have not—agree that time is the great healer.
D. The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of first importance to us. But this is not a business that can be undertaken in a day. The growth of alterative mental interest is a long process.
E. Unfortunately, all of these things do little more than alleviate the symptoms without touching the cause of the ailment.
F. However it ended and whoever took the initiative to end it, the pain is equally intense and hard to bear. It is a sort of death, and it requires the same period of mourning, the same time for grief.
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