On The Threshold

“I needed some closure to try to hopefully help start some healing,” Joe Hunter said as he shed a few tears and stared out over the ocean from a beach in Fiji in a scene from the CBS reality show “Survivor.”

Survivor

Okay I’ll admit it: Survivor is one of my guilty pleasures. It’s easy to dismiss it as contrived. I mean, it’s television. The camera pans up, shows him wiping away tears and staring wistfully out to sea.

But his statement triggered the feels. His sister, Joanna, wanted them to be on the show together. But he lost her to domestic violence. Hunter applied, wanting the experience in her honor, while feeling responsible for not protecting her, especially since their last words were an argument.

He had his moment of closure in making it to the final five of the game show, and finally expressed for viewers his apology to his sister and acceptance of the depth of his grief.

More Like A Window

We talk about closure like it’s a final moment, like a door closing, when, really, it’s more of an acknowledgement and naming of a point in the process of change. For the large transitions in our life, that term “closure” is something that might instead be what social scientists think of as a rite of passage, like getting married or graduating. Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner explored the concept of liminality, that threshold state when we are betwixt and between two states of being in a rite of passage.

There’s a before and after to the moment we name “closure,” and it thus encompasses that dangerous, uncertain and disorienting state of liminality anthropology tells us occurs when we stand on the threshold with multiple options before us.

Closure, while stated in terms of finality, that end point to a ritual that leaves us in a new state, is really more of a gradual ending of one thing and the gradual beginning of something else. We can’t see through doors. It’s more like a window onto where we came from, and possibly what’s next. But it can be dangerous, like liminal spaces often are. We don’t always know whether the path we’re on is the right one, or where it leads. It’s a process of shifting from one place in one’s growth to another, one place in our awareness to another, one status to another, one identity to another.

Under The Transom

So much of our literature, culture, folklore, is bound up in the rituals of these transitions, these spaces of change. We even enshrined them in the seasons, the shift from winter to spring and summer to fall, like the migratory pattern of wildlife. From greening to browning and warming to cooling, daylight lengthening or retreating, it leads some of us to even feel the pull of that migratory syndrome in those liminal spaces.  There’s a threshold that we cross. But we often linger beneath the transom.

Whether it’s coming of age – not quite an adult in experience, clearly not a child in years – or going from couple to a single, alive to dead, unborn to born, all of these milestones encompass ritual in those moments of change. We have a closing when we buy a new house. But it isn’t in a single moment. We mark the change with an act, but there are points of transition along the way, and points of transition afterward. It feels like it’s not a clean break until we pass that closure moment we think of as ending one state and entering another. But instead of a break, it’s more like sunset: gradually growing darker until the sun fully sets, but the gloaming may linger long after.

We may call it a closure when we end a feud with mutual apology, return to a seminal place in our maturity such as a childhood home or school reunion. But is it really closed?

It’s Never A Clean Break

Some, perhaps most transitions remain incomplete.  We mark that change with some ritual but it’s never a clean break. And during that liminal space, that not quite one, not quite the other, many things can happen.

When my husband died, we had a funeral. My son and I created a few little rituals. We planted a tree and installed a bench and periodically visited. It wasn’t closure. Grief leaves us in that liminal space. Things change that we don’t expect. I remember my mother-in-law warning me that friends would disappear. And most of them eventually did. As much as it truly hurt at the time, only one was bold enough to say it wasn’t about me, it was about him. He couldn’t be friends with me without my husband. It was too painful or awkward for him. It was painful for me. That transition to being the person who no longer lives in their grief, who is a single, not a couple, that closure, took me something like five years before I finally put our wedding rings away and accepted that new identity.

We constantly ritualize these changes in our lives, the weddings and showers and funerals and graduations. It’s part of my storytelling. In The Enchanter’s Web, the assumption that one must pass certain rituals and observe certain traditions drives numerous conflicts that alter characters’ fates.

It’s hard for us to think about a big change in our lives without somehow making a ritual of it, of acknowledging it as a point of closure.

So, Why Did Joe Hunter’s Moment On The Beach Get Me?

I’m living through several of those transitional moments.  One is that final launch of the prodigal child. Oh yes, 10 years ago he graduated high school and I sent him off to college. But that’s one of those closure moments that isn’t fully closed: he might no longer be under my roof, but the umbilical cord was still attached to my bank account. Even while away at school, he lived only a two-hour drive from his safety net, and still in my state.

But now, PhD and new job in hand, he’s moving to another state. It’s not like the tears I shed when I sent him to Kindergarten knowing I’d be picking him up in a few hours. It’s not like the tears shed driving home from his college dorm, because he wasn’t far away and he’d be home for the holidays. When he went to grad school, that relationship matured. But he lived only a half an hour away, and I still covered our weekly meetups for lunch or dinner, knowing he barely earned enough to make rent. Now, he will earn more than I ever did with my PhD and years of experience. He won’t need his mother as he once did.

Around the time he was born, I had just begun publishing fiction. I began work on my novels. But the child, then the unexpected single parenting, then grad school, and then those 60-hour work weeks meant the novels I spent so many years thinking about, tweaking now and then, re-imagining, always remained in that liminal space of being written, not quite finished, and unpublished.

Now they’re done. They’re published. They’re out the door. There won’t be more tweaking. All my babies have launched as I transition toward that other closure: contemplating my mortality and the likelihood that it will come sooner than I’d hoped.

On The Threshold

I have more to write. I’m rewriting one novel and another is a third written. A reader even suggested I should write a sequel to one of the novels I’ve just finally launched. And there’s those nonfiction projects that cancer put on hold.

It isn’t closure like closing a door. My son isn’t gone forever; we’re talking about still finding a way to meet up maybe once or twice a month. My novels still need to find their audience. I know there is one, I just need to find them. And I’m not dead yet.

But I feel bereft, that odd sense when something ends and all the planning is done. I remember feeling that after I turned in my dissertation and defended it. Now what? I spent almost a decade working on it and then I was just done, except for the party … and then… I and a couple of grad school friends celebrated by burning drafts of our dissertations. It’s kind of cathartic watching how quickly it goes up in flames. It was still a few years before the imposter syndrome and the fear that someone would call out my research faded.

I spent the better part of three decades raising a child and thinking about novels that weren’t quite there and … now they’re done. There’s work to be done. But I don’t know how to step into it. It’s the day after the wedding, the funeral, the graduation. It’s a moment of closure that requires some ritual that I feel like I haven’t had.

So, I shed tears as I recognize someone else’s journey, someone else having at last found that closure as he stands on a beach in Fiji. It isn’t really “closure.” But he had his ritual. Now he can move on to the rest of the process of transitioning into his new acceptance.

Maybe this post is my closure moment.

Nah … I think I need a party. Or at least a good bonfire.

 

(Cover image of Bicheno, Tasmania, by Meg Turville-Heitz)

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