We Had Already Chosen Her Room

You had decided which room was hers.

Not out loud, maybe. But you had walked through it on the second viewing and stood in the small one at the back with the window over the garden and thought: that one. And then, on the way home in the car, you said something about the light in the mornings, and neither of you said what you were actually doing, and both of you knew.

Then the call came and it had gone to somebody else.

And what you said was: oh well. What you said was that these things happen, and that another one will come along, and that you were not going to get upset about a house.

And then you went and did something in another room for a while.

I want to say the thing nobody will say to you, because everybody who loves you will say the other thing.

You lost something.

Not a transaction. Not an opportunity. You had begun to live in that house in your head, and the living was real, and the removal of it is a loss, and you are allowed to grieve it without anybody first agreeing that it qualifies.

And I know exactly what has been said to you this week, because it is the same everywhere.

It was not meant to be. God has something better. If it had been right it would have worked out. Everything happens for a reason.

Every one of those was said kindly. And every one of them, underneath, is doing the same job: it is asking you to stop being sad, quickly, by explaining the loss away.

I am not going to do that. I am not going to tell you what it meant.

Hope deferred

There is a line in Proverbs that names this exactly, and the fact that it is in scripture at all is most of what you need.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12, King James Version)

Read what that sentence is doing, because it is not offering comfort. It is making an observation, and it is a clinical one.

It says that hoping for something and not getting it does a particular kind of damage. Not disappointment. Sickness. The word chosen is about a body being unwell, and the location given is the heart.

You have an injury that scripture names plainly, and a disappointed hope has never once needed a lesson attached to make it real. Proverbs 13 calls it sickness and offers no explanation for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stays with somebody without needing the loss to have meant something.

And notice what the verse does not do.

It does not tell you to stop hoping in order to protect yourself. It does not say the deferral was for your good. It does not explain. It does not add a clause about how the sickness is working something in you or teaching you patience.

It states the fact and moves on.

You have a sentence in scripture that names your week without improving it, and a verse that refuses to explain has never once been a verse that left you alone in it. Proverbs 13 says hope deferred maketh the heart sick and stops there, and the Spirit of God is the one who thought that was enough to say.

You were handed an honest sentence rather than a tidy one, and a verse that refuses to explain your week has never once been a verse that abandoned you in it. The written word names the sickness and attaches nothing to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept it that bare on purpose.

Nobody is being foolish here

Here is the part I think you actually need, because I suspect the grief is not the hardest thing this week. The hardest thing is that you feel silly for minding.

It was a building. You never owned it. Nothing was taken that you had, and legally and financially the position is precisely what it was a month ago, and you know all of that, and it has not helped at all.

So let me tell you why you mind, because it is not irrational and it should not be treated as though it were.

You did not lose a house. You lost a version of your life.

You have grieved in proportion to a life and not to a property, and the size of what you feel has never once been out of scale with what actually went. Proverbs 13 makes a disappointed hope into a sickness of the heart without asking anybody to justify the feeling, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with two people who feel foolish for minding.

For a few weeks you had a place to put things. Where the table would go. What Sunday mornings would be like. Where a child would sleep and what she would see out of the window. Every one of those was a small act of imagination and every one of them was, briefly, real to you.

And when the call came, none of the bricks moved. What ended was the imagined life, and that was a thing you had actually built, and its removal is the loss.

You are carrying the end of something you built rather than the end of something you bought, and no bricks anywhere have ever once been the part that hurt. It is written that hope deferred maketh the heart sick, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows exactly which of the two things went.

Say it once, and add nothing

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the whole of it.

Say out loud to one person that the house was a real disappointment, without adding anything after it.

One person. Your partner counts, and may be the best choice, because there is a reasonable chance the two of you went brave at each other all week and neither has stopped. Say the sentence: I am really disappointed about that house. And then stop.

Do not add but it is fine. Do not add I know another one will come. Do not add I am being silly about it. Do not add I know it is only a house, and above all do not add the sentence about it not being meant to be, because that one has already gone to about four people this week and it was not believed any of the times.

You have the authority to say it and stop, and every addition afterward has never once been anything but a retraction. Proverbs 13 states the sickness without softening it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in the short silence after somebody says a bare sentence.

Every one of those additions takes the sentence back in the same breath. It tells the other person that no response is required, and so nothing lands anywhere and it is still being carried.

The bare sentence is much harder to say than it sounds. Try it and notice how strongly your mouth wants to keep going.