The Healing that Wasn’t Healing
Like so many others, I found myself swept up in the “Punch” the monkey drama. For several weeks, my feed was a relentless stream of that sweet, infant Japanese macaque clinging desperately to his stuffed orangutan. Abandoned by his mother, the baby was forced to acclimate to a troop of aggressive snow monkeys who seemed to view his presence as an affront. As they harassed and attacked him, he retreated into the soft, synthetic fur of his surrogate mother for comfort. Predictably, social media influencers moved in to exploit the tragedy—weeping on camera while playing reels of the infant’s trauma on a loop, turning a creature’s suffering into a viral commodity.
It felt wrong on multiple levels—voyeuristic—but the drama of grief was deeply compelling. America was rooting for Punch. We wanted him to find love and acceptance. Our hearts broke when the first monkey from the tribe held him. “Punch’s first friend,” the headlines rang. He had found the embrace of a living being, not just a stuffed monkey, and the whole world breathed a collective sigh of relief. We could all relate.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was doing the same thing.
For me, grief was an out-of-body experience. If you’ve ever seen Gravity, you’ll understand what I mean. When tragedy hits, the enormity of it can feel like drifting into the vast nothingness of space, clinging to a fragile lifeline we know is not enough to keep us alive. In grief, we search desperately for comfort—something to hold onto. Like Punch, we cling to a stuffed orangutan. There is comfort there, but it is not enough.
What is grief, really? When my husband left me, I was destabilized. Grief is vulnerability, abandonment, insecurity. It is to face the world naked in the icy wind, just as Punch was forced to do.
As a modern and capable woman, my first reaction to marital betrayal was to gain agency—to get my power back. Scientific research and ancient wisdom support agency—moving forward, staying busy—but there is a danger in it, especially for Christian women.
After infidelity, my deepest wound was the belief that if my husband did not love me, who could? There must be something deeply unlovable about me. What a terrible burden to carry. Instinctively, I tried to gain value in the eyes of others to compensate for the scars I now carried. This became a life of work and tireless service within my church community. In fact, this is often how many churches are structured—directing the labor of women eager to prove their worth as the primary growth strategy of the institution.
The reality of this service-obsessed work ethic is a new kind of enslavement. For me, it was neither freeing nor did it give me the self-worth and dignity I so desperately needed. Instead, it trapped me in a cycle of endless striving to prove my value rather than resting in my identity as a child of God. There were moments I genuinely enjoyed the work, but I was on a treadmill.
If I stop running, they’ll stop loving me.
Debby Handman is a former minister (M.Div), educator, and single mother writing from the misty crossroads of faith and survival in rural Oregon. She is the author of the acclaimed novels House on Sand and The Gambler’s Wife, and her upcoming release, House of Broken Vessels.
