How Should You Process the Death of an Ex?

When it comes to affairs of the heart, we are all beginners. Some of us, however, at least speak with authority. Introducing Shon Faye, author of The Transgender Issue (2021) and the forthcoming Love in Exile (2025), whose advice caught our eye. Contact her at [email protected] for your own chance at enlightenment.

Dear Shon,

I found out recently that my ex died. He was very young and it was a real shock. I hadn’t spoken to him for a few years. Our relationship had been very intense, and although he didn’t treat me very well and it wasn’t great for my health, I still really loved him and cared for him. I assumed that I could get something like closure with him in the future, and now that has been taken away. Maybe that was a selfish assumption in the first place. I feel pretty hopeless in general. How do you get closure in a relationship when the other person has gone? Is that even possible?

Sincerely,

L.

Dear L

I am sorry for your loss. It may feel strange that I’m saying this to you and you may feel that it’s unwarranted or inappropriate given your estrangement from your ex when he died. But you have lost here: You have lost the hope you had for some kind of face-to-face conversation and amends with your ex, you have lost the hope that your ex may grow and change into a person who could accept his part in what went wrong between you, and you have a right to feel shock and sadness about the finality of losing a person from the world with whom you shared pivotal, vulnerable moments of your own life. This all sounds very natural and proportionate to such desperately sad news.

On the matter of closure, I think you need to drop words like selfish about your assumption that one day you would speak to him again. I think most of us, when we break up with someone we still love, tell ourselves there may be the chance to see or speak to the other person again as a way to bear the immediate pain of separation. We are social animals, built for connection and that means that when we love someone and are attached to them, the prospect of losing them completely can feel immensely painful. “I will never speak to this person I love again” is almost impossible to bear. So we assure ourselves that, one day, we will be reunited and all will be fine—we will see them again, laugh about the past and be like Gwen Stefani in the video for “Cool.”

The truth is that this happens very rarely. The passage of time (and no contact) is generally what “closes” or completes relationships for us, not big sit down reunions to rake over the past. More often than not, those conversations are either fruitless because the other person cannot give us the answers to the questions we are ruminating over, or they are pointless because our lives have already moved on and we no longer care enough. You say your ex didn’t treat you well, so it sounds like you were holding out hope that one day he might have acknowledged the hurt he caused you and it would take the pain away. But, even if your ex were still alive, I would tell you that you may never have received that affirmation from him, and holding out for it may have prevented you from fully healing and moving on by yourself.

I would suggest that you give yourself permission to mourn your ex for the flawed person he was: a person who brought you both joy and pain. I would also suggest that his death need not prevent you from obtaining a sense of resolution about what happened between you. Why not write your ex a long letter, telling him exactly how you feel, how you will miss him, what the best memories of him you will carry are and what you are still absolutely furious with him about. Don’t hold back, get it all out. Say everything you never got to say. Then take it to his final resting place, if it is a public place, or if not, take it to a place that was meaningful for you and him—a place you both shared together—and read it aloud to him. When that is done, you can destroy the letter.

Did you and your ex have any mutual friends? Sometimes, sharing our grief with others who knew the deceased can counteract the loneliness of loss. Talking about someone who has died and the role they played in our life, bringing them up casually in our conversations, helps us with the transition to a new kind of relationship with them. One where we carry both their memory and our past self with us; living our life fully to bear witness to what our love for them has given us.