#44: You can’t go home again.

Side-stepping nostalgia to love what is.

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I never had a mother-in-law. 

Mike’s mom Mary Ann died four years before his Mediterranean blue eyes and angular jaw caught my attention in the picture line on our first day of grad school.

Here we are just moments after we met. I had thought, “Wow, he’s so handsome! He must be a real jerk. I’ll avoid him for the next two years.”

There was no evidence of this catastrophic loss on the surface of Mike’s life. But like gravity, her presence — or more accurately, her absence — was an invisible yet inescapable force in the early years of our relationship. 

The ocean-deep, unconditional love he had shared with his mom defined how Mike believed love could and should feel. But that love was also frozen in time, idealized, and used as an impossible measuring stick for our young, everyday, learning-the-hard-way, flesh-and-blood love.

Because of this experience — the years it took us to deconstruct Mike’s unrealistic expectations for love — I have a very different relationship with nostalgia than most. Its otherworldly romanticization has always had a sinister gleam. And yet, even I find myself wrestling to avoid its trap.

Just three weeks into my empty nest, I’m noticing the ways that my mind already wants to paint the dirty dishes and piles of laundry and endless eye rolls in the rosy shade of yesteryear. And I’m wondering if we can accept that there will always be parts of the past that we long for… without diminishing our satisfaction in the present moment.

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Times of cataclysmic change make us long for control.

After a major disruption, we find ourselves desperately squinting through our fogged-up windshield into the darkness of our unknown future. With limited visibility and too much adrenaline, we have no choice but to put the car in gear and drive on, braced for a hairpin switchback or abrupt dead end. 

During these times, remembering the past in it’s best light offers us a taste of the safety and assuredness we so sorely long for.

(Oh, how our coping mechanisms always seem so innocent in the beginning!)

In The Future of Nostalgia, Dr. Svetlana Boym writes, "There should be a special warning on the sideview mirror: The object of nostalgia is further away than it appears."

"Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy."

I’ve written before about how forgetting some of the messy details of a person can help us love them more fully. Forgetting is the fast track to forgiveness. With the rough edges of stale disagreements and disappointments sanded away, we are able to step back and appreciate the broad strokes of the human being (or time of life) that once was.

However, as Dr. Boym explains, we can take this memory curation too far — into full-fledged revision. To that point, she breaks down the two ends of the nostalgia spectrum:

Reflective nostalgia is the feeling of longing that we can’t avoid. We miss what we had in the past. It’s painful but it’s actually healing: we understand that the past is in the past. Allowing ourselves to feel that pain helps us to be more present, because we understand that life is fleeting and we have to enjoy it while we can.

Then there is restorative nostalgia, which is the feeling that we can somehow recreate not just the past, but our fantasy of the past.

While reflective nostalgia is painful but inevitable and even helpful, restorative nostalgia is problematic, crippling our path forward in two distinct ways:

1. When we mythologize the past as perfect, we create a deeper sense of imperfection in the present.

2. By believing we can recreate the past, we are side-stepping the pain of loss. The longer we avoid grief by believing that we can go backwards, the more painful it becomes to rejoin the present.

Mike didn’t believe he could bring his mom back to life. But he thought he could recreate the idealized love, support, safety, and sense of belonging that they had shared… which was a figment of his grieving imagination anyway.

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Mike deserves a mountain of credit for releasing that fantasy for the sake of our love and our family.

I can’t imagine how hard it was to pull himself away from that dream into a reality that felt painful by comparison. But he did it.

Tongue firmly in cheek, Mike would refer to his mom as ‘Saint Mary Ann’ to the point where it was even a joke in our house: once you die, all your scratchy moments are forgotten! The times you lost your temper, missed a carpool, forgot a swim meet evaporate. You are a god among mortals. We’d also level-set our conversations about her saintliness with funny anecdotes from Mike’s childhood along with the ways in which Mary Ann’s life was hard. We made her into a real person, the real person she always was. 

A real person just like us.

By embracing that the past does not have to be idealized to be cherished, we can learn to love the present in the same way. And by realizing that the present is bursting with imperfect love but love nonetheless, we are able to look back and love what was, without changing a thing.

I remember the moment when it fully set in for Mike — and for me, through him: reality doesn’t have to be perfect to be perfect.

No matter how idyllic the daydream, it can never hold a fraction of the fulfillment and satisfaction that comes from being fully immersed in the present moment.

It just doesn’t count if our bodies don’t get to experience it.

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Restorative nostalgia is at it’s core another avoidance technique.

We find a way to believe that we can somehow go backwards in order to not feel the full weight of what we have lost — which is a miserable combination of the person (or time in our life) along with the opportunity to fully appreciate them while they were around.

But healing doesn’t work that way.

We must make the sadness, the longing, the hard, tough, tear-inducing, exasperating, ‘when will I be past this?’ feeling part of us. We must befriend it, not reject it. We must accept that some pain will always exist. We can’t treat that feeling like Pluto and say they were never really a planet anyway. We can’t just refuse to pick them for our kickball team. We can’t paint over them using restorative nostalgia. 

We have to make the pain a part of us. 

I’ve been asked so many times how I was able to let Mike’s death transform me rather than simply destroying me. My answer is always evolving because I’m still figuring it out myself… But as I write this, it’s clear that having a front-row seat as Mike excavated his frozen-love-fantasy-nostalgia-grief-pit was part of my saving grace.

I just knew that path was a trap. I knew that I had to bear full witness to all I had lost without sugarcoating a thing. I knew that trying to avoid an ounce of the pain would just cause it to fester and create more pain in the future. And I was stubborn enough to believe that I could figure out another way.

Despite the stories that swirl around the collective about grief, we are strong enough to hold the paradox of pain and love and loss and gratitude and regret without rewriting history.

There’s one more piece here... A piece about the way we relate to reality in general. When we acknowledge the imperfections of the people or times that are no longer here, we also get closer to accepting the imperfections in ourselves. We remember that no one, no time, no thing ever has been or ever will be perfect. And it’s all worth loving and enjoying anyway.

We don’t need to hide from ourselves or from reality. We just need to embrace our humanity.

And with that, I think it’s time harass Connor and Kendall. Living with them wasn’t always a walk in the park, but I still miss them to bits.

In love with reality,

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If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

• #42: Made to heal. Practicing what I preach when faced with an empty nest.

• #38: Reclaiming loss from the grip of avoidance. Evolving our relationships with those we have lost (part 2).

• #34: Acceptance is just the beginning. The powerful first step to rebuilding after losing so much (featuring Chris Hemsworth).

• #29: Learning from laughter to trust my tears. When we feel, we heal.

• #23: Forgetting in order to remember. How the memory chisel clears our path forward.