Curses Not Foiled Again

This opening was written on Thursday, October 16, 2003, at 11:27 AM [PDT].

We usually don't start our articles with date and time stamps. Today we make an exception.

The final game of the New York Yankee - Boston Red Sox divisional playoff series is not scheduled to start until 8:15 PM Eastern time, so I cannot possibly know the result.

But I do.

No I'm not a psychic, and emotionally, a part of me really wants the Red Sox to win. But they can't. If they do they would ruin the title of this article and that would never do.

Now back to real time: Most folks are aware of the dramatic 11th inning home run that sent the Bostonians back home; devastated by past memories and current reality, and convinced their future holds more of the same.

A large percentage of Americans are also familiar with the now infamous young man named Steve Bartman. Yes, that Steve Bartman, whose reflexive reach for a foul ball in Chicago caused great grief to himself along with millions of others. His unintentional gaffe gave new dimension to the wartime phrase, "friendly fire."

Faithful readers of this weekly column have come to recognize that there's almost no event that happens in the world that cannot be correlated to grief and recovery. Baseball is no exception.

All humour aside, years ago we wrote an article called Legacy of Love or Monument to Misery. In it we addressed the sad fact that surviving spouses, after the death of a loved one with whom they'd had a glorious relationship, are often in pain for years and years following the death of their mate. One day I was talking to one of those people, in this case an 82 year old woman whose husband of 48 years had died two years earlier. During the conversation, I said, "It seems sad to me that a relationship like the one you and your husband shared should leave so much misery, instead of the legacy of love it really represented."

She cried when I said that ... and I did too.

And then I went to work and helped her understand the actions that would lead her out of the emotional wilderness that had become her life.

We do not mean to minimize or compare the pain of the death of a loved one by connecting it to a sporting event. What we really want to illustrate is that our "relationship to pain" sometimes permanently defines and limits us in most negative ways. Even though the grief event itself was bad enough, we then extend it indefinitely into the future when we don't know how to complete it.

The dual curses of the Cubs and the Red Sox are amongst the longest running "relationships to pain" we have ever observed. What the Cubs and Red Sox litanies have in common with the devastating plight of widows, widowers and other grievers is the focus on the ending and not the content of the relationship. Of course sad endings are painful. The widow in our true-life story was stuck in the ending of her relationship with her husband, and with that she overlooked and bypassed the thousands of fond and sweet memories of her marriage.

As the widow must reflect on the entire relationship, not just the end, so must suffering baseball fans remember the entire exciting year of entertainment provided by their teams. Yes, they must grieve and complete their relationship to the painful ending, then they can retain the fond memories of the great season they enjoyed along the way.