Loss

Several observations about loss. If you are experiencing loss or near to someone experiencing it, one of these points might resonate:

1. Part of the pain of loss is fear. The way a person deals with difficulty is through personal resources—through the people, assets, capacities and possibilities available to them. But now, through loss, the composition of the self and its life and resources is lacking a vital component. One is left to ask: How do I face the loss of X when X is what I formerly relied on to face setback? The sufferer is diminished, in a sense is less because of the loss, and therefore does not accurately know her own size now, nor how great the sorrow will prove to be by comparison. The new estimates destabilize the established sense of what one is able to face.

2. For the husband and father who grieves, his wife is apt to get more of him and his children are apt to get less. The wife is a comforter who is stronger and wiser about facing and carrying emotion than he is. He needs this. The husband is a protector who wants to keep his children from pain, including contact with his own. He pulls back to guard them. These are not universal depictions of every couple or family, but a pattern worth seeing in the way a father’s loss might flow through the family.

3. Treasured old photos get a pallor for a time. Those happy people back then—they were naïve. Did their happiness have less worth because they did not know this loss was coming? No, no. This pallor passes because it must; its premise cannot possibly be true. Happiness today is not tarnished by unknown pain that lay in the future. The photos heal back into being treasure again.

4. Life deludes us into believing that loss is abnormal. For many, the early decades of life are a ratchet of gain upon gain: growth, graduation, new discoveries, loves, lovers, bad jobs leading to better jobs, babies, possessions, trips. But loss is inevitable arithmetic. The effect and reach and season of each of these positive developments traverses its arc and, in the case of some of them, comes to an end. Live long enough, and one must cross a threshold beyond which the losses outpace new gains. Indeed, to have a rich life of gain upon gain is to magnify the feel of unnaturalness when loss begins. A life with some sorrow is therefore a life of strength, and stability, providing not only resilience against what must come, but also a well of depth out of which appreciate rises.

5. Loss is staggering in part because it raises questions of identity. The healing from the loss proves staggering for the same reason. If self and life lose a vital component, then what is this life and who is this self that cohere by drawing together the components that remain? If I find that I am still me without X, then who am I—and who was I back then? The loss is no less painful after this coherence, and it is still a marker of great and grave change, and yet it is something other than a subtraction if the person afterward feels herself standing taller than the person she remembers from before.

Related: What to Say to Someone Who Is Hurting or Who Has Suffered a Loss.

Photo: “Grief” by x1klima

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