Whether or not we feel that the person we have lost is irreplaceable, loss is usually difficult in the context of romance. It is devastating to give up a person we love, even when we recognize that the separation is necessary. The process of reconfiguring our inner world to accommodate the void left by the absent person can be demanding for, ultimately, it forces us to reconceive who we are. We cannot relinquish our investment in an adored person without considerable psychological readjustment. The purpose of this readjustment is to enable us to proceed with our lives without the person we have lost. This is why the initial stages of loss often find us ambivalently split between our need for inner regeneration and our desire to remain faithful to our lost lover. On the one hand, we wish to transcend the past so as to be free to strive into the future. On the other, we may feel slightly guilty about overcoming our loss. We may even feel that to the extent that we endure the loss, we betray the one we have loved.
Our everyday lives facilitate the speedy disappearance of lost loves in the sense that those who are missing cannot always compete against the intense allure of new impressions, enticements, temptations, and challenges. Since those who are no longer present in our lives make no urgent demands on our awareness—since they do not absorb us in any immediate manner—it can be relatively easy to push them to the outer rim of our consciousness. To the degree that the future beckons us with multiple invitations to step into the forward-moving cadence of our lives, those we have left behind gradually whither away in silent resignation. Against this backdrop, our refusal to surrender the memory of persons we have lost can be a means of venerating those who have touched us most meaningfully. Our melancholy ethos of loving recollection can be a way of waging a battle against the power of the present to cancel out the past.
Most of the time, however, our attachment to lost lovers arises from the simple (and far less noble) fact that an emotional void is inherently painful to us. Many of us cannot cope with such a void without a temporary crutch of some sort: a friend, therapist, work, travel, Hollywood, alcohol, or drugs, for instance. In the long run, however, the process of grieving is much more complicated. As Freud observed in a well-known discussion of mourning and melancholia, one of the most common ways we manage grief is by internalizing characteristics of the person we have lost. That is, we defer the cold finality of the separation by incorporating treasured aspects of the lost person into our own psychological makeup; we translate an external loss into an internal presence so that our lost lover continues to live on within our private world long after we have lost him or her. In Freud’s memorable words, the “shadow of the other” falls upon us in the sense that the person we have lost becomes an integral part of who we are.
I have talked a great deal about the expansion of personality that takes place when we invite a new lover into our lives. But Freud’s insight about the process of grieving suggests that this expansion may also result from loss—that mourning may over time contribute to the versatility of our inner lives. This is because we cannot assimilate attributes of the person we have lost into our psychological landscape without redrawing the fundamental sketch of our character; we cannot welcome a lost lover into our psyches without ourselves becoming a slightly different (and hopefully more evolved) version of ourselves. This implies that if our personality always owes a debt to our present lover, it also owes a debt to those we have loved in the past. In some ways, our character is a sedimented depository of our losses: our identity reflects the history of whom (and how) we have lost. If every new loss alters our inner composition just as powerfully as every new love does, then who we are at any given moment is in part at least determined by the kinds of people we have had to renounce.
If this is the case—if it is true that our psyches hold a permanent trace of our past losses—then loss, while obviously a source of sadness, also plays an important role in the ripening of our character. One could even speculate that the more we have lost, the deeper, richer, and more diverse our identities. Though the trauma of loss can initially overwhelm us, in the final analysis it may be the element of life that most distills our being. Each new loss hurls us into unanticipated directions; each new loss inserts nuance to our character. In the same way that pebbles on a sandy beach progressively lose their rough edges to the insistent to and fro of the ocean, the bitter tides of disenchantment polish our personality, resurrecting deposits of poise and dignity that we may have largely lost track of. In this sense, it is in part through agonizing processes of mourning that we arrive at a highly singular sense of who we are.
Insofar as mourning addresses the more mystical side of our being, it may communicate the kind of meaning that is inaccessible by any other means. As philosophers and artists have reported over the centuries, being stuck in sadness may serve as a foundation for deep acumen and inventiveness. Because sadness removes us from our usual concerns, it allows us to withdraw into contemplative moods that resonate with the more reclusive parts of our interiority. It invites us to visit the most isolated corners of our private world so that we can progressively sort through the implications of our suffering. In this manner, we may attain deeply intuitive forms of self-understanding that enable us to reassess our habitual ways of meeting the world. Over time, such reappraisals can lead to genuine changes of direction.
There is thus a potent afterlife to every important loss. How we deal with this afterlife impacts how we end up living our lives. There are undoubtedly times when sadness deflates and impoverishes us. But, ideally, it purifies our spirit. To the extent that it forces us to take a close look at ourselves—that it compels us to confront facets of ourselves that we are estranged from, find difficult to appreciate, or never even knew existed—it asks us to reassess what we have done, how we have chosen to live, and where we are headed; it urges us to release to the world what we most esteem about ourselves. Even if we are at first too injured to appreciate this process of inner refinement, we may over time come to realize that we have obtained something incomparably valuable.
It is a testimonial to the tenacity of the human spirit that we routinely find ways to transform love’s losses into personal meaning. Yet our culture tends to be so focused on the quest for happiness that we sometimes find it challenging to accept (let alone embrace) the sadder tonalities of existence. In addition, as members of the social world, we are expected to overcome the various setback of our lives as quickly as possible so as to be able to reintegrate ourselves into the productive flow of collective life; we are asked to thrust aside our suffering so that we can, once again, be fully functioning and industrious members of our communities. One of the most valuable effects of love’s losses is that they often make it impossible for us to meet such expectations. They force us to sit with our sorrow. They oblige us to slow down and to perceive our lives differently, from the unique vantage point of our deepest regrets and desires.
Let us recall that when we first enter the world, we do not possess much psychological depth. The process of becoming a multifaceted person entails the capacity to digest life experiences that are intended to cultivate our character. Being able to endure moments of sadness is foremost among such experiences, as are the inescapable adversities and calamities that haunt human existence. Such hardships dissolve and wash away what is superfluous about our being, bringing us in contact with the essential building blocks of our personality. Over time, they add layer upon layer of complexity onto our identity, rendering us the many-sided creatures we are. In this sense, the process of crafting a character demands privations as much as moments of fulfillment. It is therefore not always a soothing or a particularly comfortable process. Yet, as human beings, it is all we have.
Suffering could thus be said to have an initiatory value in the sense that a psyche that has not known sadness is not necessarily a fully realized psyche. Sadness, in other words, is not always useless. This does not mean that we should chase sadness, or that all sadness has beneficial consequences. On the contrary, there are forms of sadness that leave us shattered without giving us anything at all in return. And the world is certainly filled with suffering that is entirely futile—that does not lead to anything affirmative. At the same time, it may well be that we cannot reach life’s enticing peaks without opening ourselves to its abrupt drops and abysses. As Nietzsche points out in many of his writings, the multiple defeats, errors, blunders, fissures, deprivations, and dead ends of life contribute to the nobility of our character because they almost by definition steer us into a process of inner regeneration. In his words, “You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes.”
Nietzsche essentially proposes that suffering can over time lead to a nimble resurrection of the spirit. This is because we cannot accurately predict, at any given moment, what we might find valuable in the future. To the degree that the meaning of our experiences unfolds gradually, over the entirety of our lifetimes, we cannot determine ahead of time where we will end up; we cannot know the full significance of any particular event when we are still in the midst of it. Because life tends to develop along meandering lines, our misfortunes may eventually turn out rather well. A sudden tear in the ordinary fabric of our lives may provoke a massive reorganization of our entire life orientation. A breakdown of our usual psychological functioning may lead to an emotional breakthrough that creates the groundwork for a new beginning. Or, we may discover that hitting a limit or an obstacle of some sort leads us to an unanticipated opportunity—one that we would not have stumbled upon had we not reached an impasse.
This implies that it is often best not to pass judgment on the losses of love based on what is readily apparent on the surface—that loss can at times have unexpected benefits. One reason for this is that whenever we experience a loss of any kind, we feel compelled to find surrogates for what we have lost. In much the same way that the primordial loss of the Thing causes us to pursue substitutes, every fresh love loss induces us to try to fill our newly painful void through various forms of creative activity. We may write, paint, compose, take photos, or play a musical instrument. We may figure out how to make a profit on the stock market. Or we may invent new scientific paradigms, bury ourselves in research, look for more effective treatments for a disease, travel the world in search of adventures, or teach what we know to those who are hungry to learn. Some of us become involved in communal or political causes, committing our energies to embettering the world one tiny step at a time. Or, more intimately, we may seek to make a positive contribution in the lives of our friends and relations. It hardly matters how creativity manifests itself, as long as we manage to find a way to invest ourselves in some aspiration that empowers us to reach beyond our loss. In this fashion, loss actively elicits acts of innovation.
Creativity can be an immensely powerful antidote to the loss of love, offering us a constructive means of managing our suffering. When we are unable to mobilize this antidote, we tend to remain trapped in our feelings of remorse and inconsolable deprivation. Conversely, the moment we are able to put some project or ambition in the place of the person we have lost, we once again begin to live our lives. Creativity provides a solid container for our grief, giving a tangible structure to processes of mourning that might otherwise overpower us; it marshals the potentially crushing emotions that crowd our consciousness so that these emotions become available for less desolate use. Or, to put the matter slightly differently, it mutes the sharpness of loss by knitting a protective veil of personally resonant meaning around the raw wounds of absence. Through it, we engage in an alert alchemy of inner metamorphosis that alleviates the ache within our being.
Creativity allows us to gradually replace past lovers by the countless products of our day-to-day activity. By generating goals and objects that compensate for our loss, it may over time help us transform the void that devours us into a cradle of ingenuity. However, creativity can also provide a more roundabout strategy for coping with loss in the sense that it can, under certain conditions, be a means of prolonging the memory of those we have lost. It can serve as a circuitous method of commemorating those who are absent by capturing their imprint within the meshes of our imaginative undertakings. The French critic Hélène Cixous communicates this perfectly when she depicts the power of writing to recuperate a lost person: “I write and you are not dead. The Other is safe if I write.” Writing, according to Cixous, protects and keeps alive the person we mourn, halting, or at the very least postponing, his or her definitive departure from our lives. Writing pours into the abyss generated by the other’s disappearance so that the other is reincarnated—venerated and revived—with each new sentence, phrase, idiom, or word. From this perspective, writing is a gesture of faithfulness that is designed to maintain a relationship that might otherwise be lost to the stealthy passage of time. Through writing, the lost person is, so to speak, woven into a text, which implies that he or she will live on as long as the text itself does.
Writing offers a poetic (rather than a literal) dwelling for the one who has vanished. Other forms of creativity may operate differently, yet they all share the power to celebrate the memory of the one who is absent. They in fact imply that absence can at times function as a heightened form of presence in the sense that the one who cannot be forgotten occupies all the more space—signifies all the more fervently—in our psyches; the person who has been lost is, as it were, more present in his absence than he might have been when he was still a part of our lives. Indeed, creative activities do not even necessarily need to be “about” the person in question to be able to render him acutely “present.” They can refer to him in faint and entirely implicit ways, yet still hold him in the very forefront of our consciousness.
Although creativity cannot ever redeem our losses in any ultimate sense, it is an exceptionally effective means to mourn. It enables us to detach ourselves from our lost lover little by little, according to our own timetable. It allows us to retain an indirect connection to him while steadily increasing our independence from him. In fact, since no single artifact of our creative efforts can ever provide an entirely satisfactory—or even an adequate—replacement for the person we grieve, loss can animate countless imaginative pursuits, countless attempts to convey meaning; it can give rise to a nearly inexhaustible inclination to bring new things into the world. In this way, it keeps our desire mobile and malleable. It makes it possible for us to sidestep our tendency to resort to rigid commemorative monuments—melancholy edifices—that aim to preserve the past within the present in an unchanging form.
Freud argued that the difference between melancholy fixations and mourning is that mourning eventually comes to an end whereas melancholia never does. We tend to get caught up in melancholia when we lose a person who demands our loyalty so intensely—who is so immensely precious to us—that we find it inconceivable to disavow him or her. The loss of such a person is so unthinkable that we try to pretend that it never actually took place. We refuse to mourn because doing so would require us to admit the irreversibility of our loss. This is how we sometimes entangle ourselves in a melancholy yearning that is at once outdated (belonging to the past) and without hope (unrealizable in the future).
Melancholia tends to fill us with painful memories to such an extent that our desire becomes immobilized. Because it has no viable object, it does not know where to turn. It flounders and our life force drains away with it. Not only are we incapable of pursuing new loves, but our general curiosity about the world may also grind to a halt. Such states can feel terribly heavy. Suspended between a past desire that is no longer sustainable and the gaping void of the future, we go through the motions of life without feeling fully alive. We exist in a hazy state of apathetic nonengagement. Our movements feel like wading through molasses. No matter how much our friends, or others close to us, endeavor to entice us out of our self-imposed isolation, we cannot find anything to desire. We cannot even begin to envision what our new desire would look like. Deep down, we may even be a bit intimidated by the prospect of having to one day name it. We prefer the knowable misery of our past desire to the unknowable demands of new ones.
Against this backdrop, creativity is invaluable because it keeps us from falling into endless melancholia. By allowing us to move forward even when we are terribly injured, it helps us resume forms of mourning that have gotten blocked. In this manner, it shields our psyches from the most chilling and life-arresting devastations of loss. Ideally, it makes it possible for us to slowly transition from the paralyzing space of a fractured emotional alliance to a more elastic form of reminiscence whereby the person we have lost is gently gathered within the pleats of our imaginative efforts. Such efforts empower us to signify our suffering, gradually transforming an unnameable ache into a nameable recollection. They are a means of diffusing loss, of translating it into something that we can endure and live through and, in the long run, perhaps even use as a starting point for alternative ways of attaining fulfillment. From this perspective, it is our capacity to shape loss into creativity that enables us to begin to live again, that (time after time) gives us access to a future; it is our ability to pour our despair into a network of meaning that opens a space for life beyond loss.
We have thus arrived at a paradox of sorts. On the one hand, as I proposed in the beginning of this chapter, being stuck in sadness can lead to valuable life lessons. On the other, my discussion of creativity implies that we cannot fully benefit from these lessons until we are able to enter into a process of mourning that allows us to move past our sadness—that will in fact eventually extinguish it. This is the case because sadness is a torpid psychological state that is, in the final analysis, unable to usher us into the future. Sadness offers us rare forms of wisdom precisely because it immobilizes us in ways that few other life experiences do. But to capitalize on that wisdom, we must ultimately be able to transcend our sadness: we must allow mourning to take its course. More specifically, we must learn to mourn not only the person we have lost, but also those versions of ourselves that thrived within the relational dynamic that we had with that person. We need to grieve not only the person we once held dear, but also who we were in relation to that person.
Mourning requires the capacity to give up pain. This may be more difficult than it sounds, for our attachment to pain can, ironically enough, be absolutely ferocious. Particularly when pain is our only remaining connection to the person we have lost, we may be tempted to harbor it for the simple reason that we do not want to break that final bond. Yet we must in the end find a way to do so, for whenever we resist mourning for too long, we remain imprisoned in outmoded passions. We find it impossible to welcome, and perhaps even to identify, emerging emotional possibilities. According to this account, it is our ability to mourn—or, more properly, to not be intimidated by the prospect of mourning—that makes new forms of life available to us.
In this context, it helps to consider which needs of ours the person we have lost met so that we can start to invest our desire in places that have the potential to satisfy some of the same ones. Even if we cannot ever locate the bedrock of desire that I analyzed in the previous chapter, we may be able to decide what it is that we ultimately want from life, independently of the person we are grieving. What did he or she promise that we hunger for? Is it comfort, consolation, and empathy? Respect and redemption for past grievances? Is it an enhanced sense of freedom and adventure? Prestige, success, security, or confidence? In what ways did we believe that our lover was going to enhance our lives? Once we have figured out the answers to such questions, we can work on fashioning our lives along lines that allow us to achieve some of these things separately of him or her. Even though this may in the long run entail finding another lover, it can also be a matter of learning to attain fulfillment without relying on others.
I have already remarked in passing that by far the most effective way to mourn a lost passion is to discover a new one. When we manage to do this, our desire once again reaches toward an object. We see an opening for novel delights and allegiances. As a consequence, we find it a lot less harrowing to release our hold on former investments. This explains why some of us rush into a new love affair as soon as our old one ends (or shows the slightest sign that it has started its downward slide into oblivion). And this is also why some of us become intensely devoted to professional or practical projects in the aftermath of a heartbreak. When our present reality manages to engage us fully, it is relatively effortless for us to stop thinking about past injuries. We even find it easier to forgive those who have hurt or offended us when we are devoted to something else that fully engrosses our energies. In this sense, it is not the case that we need to forget the past in order to bring about a new future. Rather, it is that we are able to transcend the past only when we become so committed to, so thoroughly excited about, something in the future that our passion crowds out the concerns of the past.
It is important to note, however, that mourning cannot be rushed. In chapter 4 I criticized our culture’s inclination to urge us to overcome our losses as quickly as possible. I would now like to add that when we artificially accelerate the pace of our mourning, when we attempt to move forward prematurely, we bypass the lessons that sadness is designed to teach us. After all, the “aim” of mourning is to ensure that, when we are ready to once again pick up the filament of our lives, we do so from a place that is slightly different from—and, with any luck, more astute and self-discerning than—the one where we left things off as a result of our loss. While melancholia fixes us in a groove that does not lead anywhere, that circles the point of loss indefinitely and without exit, mourning is meant to guarantee that we travel the distance between one stage of our lives and the next. In other words, although mourning may slow down the rhythm of our lives to the extent that it looks a lot like the sluggishness of melancholia, its sluggishness—unlike that of melancholia—has a purpose beyond itself. Its end game is to allow us to accumulate the emotional tools that, gradually, empower us to break out of the very sluggishness it insists on; its main ambition is its own eventual undoing.
The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips states with his characteristic incisiveness: “Refusal to mourn is refusal to live. Mourning is the necessary suffering that makes more life possible.” Mourning, on this view, is not the antithesis of life but rather its precondition. What is more, mourning allows us to transport what is most valuable about the past into the future. Although there may be components of the past that hold us down and that we, consequently, wish to leave behind, it would be wasteful to advance into the future without the wisdom we have garnered from the past. After all, it is this wisdom that, in so many ways, becomes the cornerstone of our aptitude for “more life.” That is, the process of working through that mourning accomplishes is essential for our ability to live well because it ensures that we do not squander the wisdom of the past.
It is common, these days, for popular spiritual and New Age philosophies to assert that we need to live fully in the present—that it is only by embracing the passing moment that we will find the serenity we are looking for. A good example of this is Eckhart Tolle’s influential notion of “the power of the now,” which paints the ability to cast off the weight of the past as a precondition of enlightenment. This reasoning can be compelling, for it is tempting to think that the less room we give to the past, the less it controls the present. It is logical to assume that the more we manage to ignore the demons of the past, the less powerfully they operate in the now. Yet I would think twice about trying to purchase the present at the expense of the past. While I appreciate the idea that, ultimately, the present is all we have, I fear that the celebration of the now can also potentially lead us astray by, precisely, cheating us out of the wisdom of the past. It can make us forget that humans are inherently historical creatures in that we cannot have a sense of personal identity without having a sense of personal history—that there is, quite simply, no way around the fact that the past is always an integral part of the “now.”
Tellingly, Tolle maintains that our self-stories—our attempts to narrativize ourselves and our personal histories—are unhelpful because they bind us to an ego-based understanding of human life that prevents us from transcending the narrow confines of our private reality. They allegedly keep us from reaching a higher plane of consciousness that would allow us to perceive that all of life is cosmically connected. There is a great deal of merit to this argument, not the least because it highlights the spiritual rewards of casting off useless rationalizations in favor of an immediacy of self-experience. However, it completely overlooks the lived reality of those who desperately need narratives of their lives so as to construct a viable conception of who they are and what they might be capable of.
There are a lot of people who have been told all their lives that they do not have the right to a life-narrative. They may have been made to feel that their personal stories were so insignificant, shameful, or inferior that they should not pollute the world by striving to tell them. Their every attempt to claim a voice may have been met with either violence or cold disregard. Alternatively, they may have felt that their stories were being told by others more powerful than them—that their personal histories (and futures) were being aggressively appropriated by those who neither understood their experiences nor had their best interests in mind. They therefore need narratives of their lives so that they can gradually begin to feel that they “own” these lives. And they may also hunger for collective narratives that connect them to a community of others who have been similarly marginalized.
I understand Tolle’s reservations about self-stories in the sense that I know that they can sometimes congeal into defensive self-representations that keep us overly dedicated to the past. Tolle is right to call attention to the ways in which we can ensnare ourselves in our narratives so that they start to define who we are, in the long run arresting our ability to participate in the process of becoming. We can even end up retraumatizing ourselves by our incessant regurgitation of past trauma. Yet the alternative strategy of banning narratives gags the very people who most need to break the silence about their suffering. In addition, it is simply not the case that narratives are by definition confining and restricting. After all, our attempts to narrativize our past are always partial, disjointed, and ongoing. Our self-stories are inevitably unstable, and as such, open to revision. Far from offering us a coherent picture of our identities, they tend to showcase the mystifying density of our lives, making it more (rather than less) difficult for us to imagine that our reality could be captured by one story, by one way of slicing the rich material of our personal histories. As a result, they may actually complexify rather than oversimplify our lives; they may allow us to reinvent ourselves over and over again, and always from a slightly different perspective.
Furthermore, although it is true that the narrativization of trauma can sometimes retraumatize us, the refusal to do so can lead to something equally counterproductive, namely, the impossibility of breaking our patterns of pain. This is because narrativization is usually a precondition of being able to work through trauma. Trauma theorists have long recognized that whenever narratives are unavailable (as they frequently are in the aftermath of trauma), trauma remains dissociated, with the consequence that its unspoken energy tends to express itself “literally,” in harrowing memory flashes or excruciating psychosomatic symptoms. In contrast, when we manage to narrativize our pain, we gradually transform it into representation. We place language between us and our traumatizing past so as to create a degree of distance from that past. In this sense, narratives—a lot like the creative processes discussed earlier—are an effective means of softening the sharpness of trauma and, therefore, of making it more livable. They are a way of taking an active stance toward what has injured us so that we can gradually lift ourselves out of the position of being a powerless victim.
From this viewpoint, self-narratives are an attempt to ensure that trauma does not destroy us. It would be easy to presume that it does, for there are obviously times when it weakens us—when we find it difficult to bounce back from hardship. Yet, as I have shown in this chapter, we can frequently learn to integrate the traumas of the past into our lives without allowing them to govern the present. Although suffering can debilitate us, it can also increase our existential agility by forcing us to access layers of strength that we might not have realized we had. Over time, our ongoing attempts to process it may even add resilience to our character, making us better able to handle the pressures, paradoxes, and points of tension that characterize human life. In this sense, there is no contradiction between being cognizant of the ways in which past pain is always a part of the present and our ability to step into the now. Rather, the former is the foundation of the latter: it is only insofar as we respect the experiences that have shaped us in the past that we can act wisely in the present.
Though there is a certain freshness to every new instant—though inner experience is sharply new at every moment—the world that we encounter is never immaculate, devoid of the (happy or somber) undertones of the past. And though, as I proposed in chapter 3, we are able to attain fleeting moments of being immediately present to ourselves, the idea that we could (or should) strive to completely shed the burdens of the past will get us nowhere. At best, it renders us dishonest not only with others, but also with ourselves, prompting us to present to the world an artificial self-image that is calculated to cover over our vulnerabilities. At worst, it makes us insensitive to the suffering of those around us, for the more adamantly we deny our own vulnerability, the less empathy we are likely to have for the vulnerabilities of others. In effect, the idea that spiritual salvation is linked to the ability to discard the past can sometimes lead to a strange indifference to the plight of those whose pasts are simply too painful to ignore. It makes it all too easy to judge those who are unable to conquer their hurtful pasts for being caught in an unenlightened “victim mentality.” It makes it easy to overlook what those who are more tolerant of human imperfection readily acknowledge, namely, that if a given person’s past insists in the present with an immense urgency, it may well be because the energies of that past are too traumatic to be readily consumed or pushed aside.