Why Some Relationships Never Really End

The people who influence us most live on in our memories, continuing that relationship

In a recent memoir by Peter Giersch, Talking of Michelangelo, there’s a small moment that lingered longer than one might expect. (Unless you know how I read, then it isn’t that surprising at all.)

In the midst of the book, which is largely articulating a crisis of faith through the lens of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Giersch recounts a graduate school experience with a professor in France, someone who had clearly played a formative role in his intellectual life. At one point, Giersch is giving a presentation he has worked on carefully, developing an idea he finds genuinely meaningful. Partway through, the professor cuts him off abruptly, publicly, and in a way that clearly lands: “Get to the point, Peter.” The class reacts. The moment passes. But it doesn’t disappear.

Years later, Giersch admits that he carried a kind of low-grade grudge. It wasn’t a dramatic and obvious wound, but something quieter, a lingering resistance toward someone who had once been a teacher, but who, in that moment, had become something more complicated. What makes the story interesting is not the conflict itself, but what happens later. After learning more about this professor’s life, what he had endured and what had shaped him, Giersch finds himself revisiting the relationship, and something shifts. He writes that, in some way, he made peace with him.

Then he adds a line that is easy to pass over but worth lingering on: “It’s so funny how relationships continue to change, even after someone dies.”

That observation runs against one of our default assumptions that relationships end when contact ends, or at least when the person is no longer present. A lingering influence is either embarassing or (more usually) ignored and denied. But Giersch’s experience suggests something different. Some relationships do not live outside us; they live within us. The people who shape us do not simply influence what we think; they become part of how we see. Their judgments, their reactions, their expectations do not disappear. They remain active, even when the person is gone, and because of that, the relationship itself can continue to change—not because they have changed, but because their place within us has.

In Giersch’s case, the same man had occupied more than one role. He had been a teacher, opening up a world of thought. But he had also become, at times, an obstacle as someone whose judgment resisted the imitator rather than guided them towards a noble object of desire. Those two positions did not cancel each other out; they coexisted, and they remained. What changed later was not the past event, but the way that relationship was situated within the whole.

We tend to think of growth as leaving the past behind, moving on, and becoming independent of the people who shaped us. But that is not quite what happens. If anything, growth looks more like a reordering than a departure. The past does not disappear; it settles into a different place.

This helps explain something most of us have experienced but do not always understand. There are moments when we know what we should do or who we should become. We can see it clearly, even convincingly, and yet something holds us back. Not confusion, not ignorance, but something else.

Found in my recent reading of Confessions, St. Augustine describes this with unsettling clarity. He comes to see the truth of the Christian faith and is intellectually convinced, and yet he cannot bring himself to fully commit to a new model, because part of him remains attached elsewhere. While it seems that he may struggle with doubts, it’s more about contradictory pulls on his being. He wants to move forward, but he feels himself pulled back. It is easy to call that indecision, but it is more precise to say that different attachments continue to exert their pull at the same time.

We all recognize this. There are voices we carry with us, which are sometimes encouraging and at other times critical. There are patterns of judgment that feel like our own, but have a history. There are reactions that seem immediate, but are not new. Sometimes what we call “our thoughts” are the echo of relationships that have not ended.

This is not necessarily a problem. It is part of how we are formed. None of us begins from scratch. The question is not whether those influences remain (they most certainly do), but where they stand. Over time, something can shift. A voice that once dominated can recede. A relationship that once carried tension can settle. What once functioned as an obstacle can remain, but no longer governs.

That is what Giersch’s line points to. Even though the immediate relationship ended, something remained, and it was capable of change, even after death. And perhaps growth is not about leaving relationships behind, but about learning where they belong.