EKR EKRA psychology student working to complete his Ph.D. was struggling with losing his seriously ill grandfather, who had helped raise him. Part of the struggle, he said, was deciding whether he should take a leave of absence from his last year of studies to spend more time with his grandfather. But he also felt compelled to complete his schooling now, because he was learning so much about life in this last year of study. “What I’m learning now in school,” he explained, “is truly helping me grow as a person.”
I said to him, “If you truly want to grow as a person and learn, you should realize that the universe has enrolled you in the graduate program of life, called loss.”
We eventually lose everything we have, yet what ultimately matters can never be lost. Our houses, cars, jobs, and money, our youth and even our loved ones, are just on loan to us. Like everything else our loved ones are not ours to keep. But realizing this truth does not have to sadden us. To the contrary, it can give us a greater appreciation for the many wonderful experiences and things we have during our time here.
In many ways, if life is a school, loss is a major part of the curriculum. As we experience loss, we also experience those we love—and sometimes even strangers—caring for us in our time of need. Loss is a hole in our heart. But it is a hole that calls forth love and can hold love from others.
We enter the world suffering from the loss of our mother’s womb, the perfect world that created us. We are thrust into a place where we’re not always fed when we are hungry, where we don’t know if Mom will come back to the crib. We enjoy being held, and then we’re suddenly put down. As we get older, we lose our friends when we or they move away, we lose our toys when they break or get lost, and we lose the softball championship. We have our first loves, only to lose them. And the series of losses has just begun. In the years that follow we lose teachers, friends, and our childhood dreams.
All the intangibles—such as our dreams, youth, and independence—will ultimately fade or end. All of our belongings are just on loan to us. Were they ever really ours? Our reality here is not permanent; neither is our ownership of anything. Everything is temporary. Trying to find permanence is impossible, and we ultimately learn that there is no safety in trying to “keep” everything. And there is no safety in trying to prevent loss.
We don’t like to see life this way. We like to pretend that we will always have life and the things within it. And we don’t want to look at the ultimate perceived loss, death itself. It is amazing to see the pretenses many families of the terminally ill carry on at the end of life. They don’t want to talk about the losses they are going through, and they certainly don’t want to mention it to their dying loved ones. The hospital personnel don’t want to say anything to their patients, either. How shortsighted of us to think that these people approaching the end of their lives are not aware of the situation. And how foolish of us to think that this actually helps them. More than one terminally ill patient has looked at his or her family and said sternly, “Don’t try to hide from me that I’m dying. How can you not say it? Don’t you realize that every living thing reminds me that I’m dying?”
The dying know what they are losing and understand its value. It’s the living who often kid themselves.
DKI learned about loss when I woke up in the middle of the night writhing in pain. I knew from the moment the pain hit that it was serious: this abdominal pain was much more than a standard stomachache. I saw my doctor, who prescribed an antacid and suggested we monitor the problem. Three days later, on a Thursday, the pain was much worse, so my doctor decided to take a closer look. He admitted me to the hospital for the day for a series of tests, including upper and lower GI studies with scopes that allowed him to see if anything in my gastrointestinal tract was abnormal.
In the recovery room, the doctor explained that he had found a tumor partially obstructing my upper intestines.
“Does this mean surgery?” I asked, alarmed.
“I took a biopsy and sent it to the lab,” he answered. “We’ll know on Monday.”
Even though I knew the tumor was just as likely to be benign as malignant, my mind and emotions went to my father, who had died of colon cancer. While waiting four excruciating days for the test results to come back, I mourned the loss of my youthful invulnerability, my health, even my life. The growth turned out to be benign, but the feelings of loss in those few days were very real.
Most of us fight and resist loss throughout our lives, not understanding that life is loss and loss is life; life cannot change and we cannot grow without loss. There’s an old Jewish saying that if you dance at a lot of weddings, you’ll cry at a lot of funerals. This means if you’re present at many beginnings, you’ll also be there for many endings. If you have many friends, you’ll experience your share of losses.
If you feel that you’re suffering great loss, it’s only because you have been so richly blessed by life. The losses we experience in life are both big and small, everything from the death of a parent to misplacing a phone number. Life’s losses may be permanent, such as death, or temporary, as when you miss your children on a business trip. The Five Stages—which describe the way we respond to all losses, not just death—can be applied to our losses in life, whether big or small, permanent or temporary. Suppose your child is born blind; you might feel it’s a major loss and respond this way:
• Denial—The doctors say he can’t follow objects with his eyes. Give him time, he’ll be able to do it when he gets older.
• Anger—The doctors should have known about this, they should have told us sooner! Why would God do this to us!
• Bargaining—I’ll be able to deal with this as long as he’s teachable and can take care of himself when he’s grown up.
• Depression—This is terrible, his life will be so limited.
• Acceptance—We will deal with the problems as they arise, and he can still have a good life filled with love.
On a more trivial note, suppose you drop a contact lens. You might respond to your loss in this way:
• Denial—I can’t believe I dropped it!
• Anger—Darn it, I should have been more careful.
• Bargaining—I promise if I find it this time, I will be much more careful in the future.
• Depression—I am so sad I lost it, now I will have to buy another.
• Acceptance—It’s okay, I was bound to lose a contact someday. I’ll order a new one in the morning.
Not everyone goes through these five stages with every loss, the responses don’t always occur in the same order, and you may visit stages more than once. However, we do experience loss many times, in many ways, and we react to our losses. With loss comes experience of its terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life.
Whatever you are feeling when you lose someone or something is exactly what you are supposed to be feeling. It is never our place to tell someone, “You have been in denial too long, it is now time for anger,” or anything like that, for we don’t know what someone else’s healing should look like. Losses feel just as they feel. They leave us feeling empty, helpless, immobilized, paralyzed, worthless, angry, sad, and fearful. We don’t want to sleep, or we want to sleep all the time; we have no appetite or we eat everything in sight. We may bounce from extreme to extreme or we may touch on everything in between. Being in any or all of these places is part of healing.
Perhaps the only certainty about loss is that time heals all. Unfortunately, healing is not always direct; it’s not like an ascending line on a graph, quickly and smoothly carrying us up to wholeness. Instead, the process feels something like being on a roller coaster—you climb toward wholeness then suddenly plunge into despair; you seem to regress, then you move forward; then you feel you’re back at the beginning. That is healing. You will heal, you will return to wholeness. You may not get back what you have lost, but you can heal. And at some point on your journey through life, you will see that you never really had, in the way you thought, that person or item you were mourning. And you will see that you will always have them in other ways.
We long for wholeness. We hope that we can keep people and things just as they are, but we know we can’t. Loss is one of our most difficult lessons in life. We try to make it easier, we even romanticize it, yet the pain of separation from someone or something we care about is one of the hardest things we will ever experience. Absence does not always make the heart grow fonder; sometimes it makes us feel sad, lonely, and empty.
Just as there is no good without bad, or light without dark, there is no growth without loss. And odd though it may sound, there also is no loss without growth. This is a difficult concept to comprehend, which is perhaps why we are always struck by it.
Some of the best teachers of this concept are parents who have lost their children to cancer. Typically, parents say the experience is the end of their world, which is understandable. Years later, some will report that they have grown through their tragedies. Of course, they would rather not have lost their children, but they can see how their losses helped them in ways they didn’t expect. They have learned that” ’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” And the truth is, we would rarely trade the experience of having and losing our loved ones with never having had them at all.
From a first glance at our lives and losses, it can be hard to see how we’ve grown. But grow we do. Those who suffer losses ultimately become stronger, more whole.
• In middle age we may lose some of our hair but realize that what’s inside is just as important as what’s outside.
• In retirement we may lose income, but we find more freedom.
• In old age we may lose a little independence, but we receive back some of the love we gave to others.
• Oftentimes when we lose the possessions of life, we find after mourning that we are freer, realizing that we were meant to travel lightly through this world.
• Sometimes when relationships end, we learn who we are—not in relation to other people, but just as ourselves.
• We may lose some items or abilities, only to realize how much we appreciate that which we have left.
EKRWhen we think of loss, we think of big losses, such as losing a loved one, our life, our home, or our money. But in the lessons of loss you find that sometimes the small things in life become the big things. Now that my life is confined to the hospital bed in my living room and the chair next to it, I am grateful that I haven’t lost some of the things most of us take for granted. With the help of a bedside commode, I can at least go piddle for myself. To me, it would be an enormous loss if I couldn’t go to the bathroom on my own, if I couldn’t take a bath by myself. Now I’m grateful for just being able to still do these things for myself.
Losing those we love to death is certainly one of the most heartbreaking experiences. An interesting comment, made with no disrespect to anyone, is that people who lose someone through divorce or separation will often say that they realize death is not the ultimate loss. Rather, it’s the separation from loved ones that is so difficult. Knowing about someone’s continued existence but being unable to share it with them may cause far more pain and make resolution far more difficult than permanent separation through death. With those who have died, however, we find new ways to share their existence as they live on in our hearts and memories.
From those who are dying, we have learned some interesting things about loss. Some common, clear lessons come to us from those who have technically been dead but were brought back to life. First, they share that they are no longer afraid of death. Secondly, they say they now know that death is only the shedding of a physical body, no different from taking off a suit of clothes one no longer needs. Third, they remember having a profound feeling of wholeness in death, feeling connected to everything and everyone, and experiencing no sense of loss. Lastly, they tell us that they were never alone, that someone was with them.
EKRA man in his thirties told me that his wife had unexpectedly left him. He felt absolutely devastated. He spoke about the anguish he was going through, then looked up at me and asked, “Is this what loss feels like? Lots of my friends have lost people to breakups and divorces, and even death. They were sad and they told me they were hurting, but I had no concept that it felt like this. Now that I know what it’s really like, I want to go back to all those people and say, ‘I’m sorry, I had no idea what you were going through.’
“I’ve grown and become much more compassionate. In the future, when a friend is dealing with a loss, I will be a completely different person, much more helpful to them. I will be there for them in ways I would never have thought of before and understand the pain they are going through in a way I could never have imagined.”
This is one of the purposes loss serves in our lives. It unifies us. It helps deepen our understanding of each other. It connects us to one another in a way that no other lesson of life can. When we are joined in the experience of loss, we care for one another and experience one another in new and profound ways.
The only thing as difficult as loss is wondering if there is going to be a loss. Patients often say, “I wish I would either get better or die!” Or, “The days spent waiting for lab tests are excruciating.”
A couple struggling to reunite complains, “The separation is killing us. We wish we could make this work—or finally end it.”
Life sometimes forces us to live in limbo, not knowing if we will experience loss. We may have to wait hours to hear if the surgery went well, a few days to see the test results, or an indeterminate period as a loved one struggles with disease. We may wait in limbo for hours, days, weeks, or longer when a child is missing. The families of soldiers missing in action are often wrenched by the living in limbo. Decades later, many have still not resolved their losses. They may not be able to, not until they learn that their loved ones are definitely dead, or rescued. But that information may never come. The nation felt the strain of limbo when John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane was reported missing for a number of days. The local, state, and federal governments threw their resources into finding out what had happened, because we needed closure.
Being in the limbo of possible loss is, itself, a loss. No matter what the outcome of the situation, it is still a loss to be dealt with.
DKI remember my father well: his bright face, the spark in his eyes, the warm smile, and the gold wristwatch with the black strap that seemed to be a part of his arm. I had never known a time when Dad and that watch were not in my life. My father knew I had always loved his watch.
Years ago, as my father was dying, I sat by his bedside, looking at him with tear-filled eyes as I said, “I don’t know how to say good-bye to you.”
My father replied, “I don’t know how to say good-bye to you, either. But I do know that I have to say good-bye to you and everything I have ever loved. Everything from your face to my home. I even looked out the window last night and said good-bye to the stars. Take my watch off,” he requested, pointing to his wrist.
“No, Dad. You’ve always worn it.”
“But it’s now time for me to say good-bye to it, and for you to wear it.”
I gently took the watch off his wrist and placed it on my own. As I gazed down at it, Dad said, “You will have to say good-bye to it someday, too.”
As the years passed, I never forgot those words. The watch has always been a bittersweet reminder of the temporariness of life. I rarely take it off. About a month ago I had a hectic day at work, then went to the gym with a friend. I showered at the gym, came home, did some work outside, showered again, and got dressed to go out for the evening. Upon going to sleep that night, I realized the watch was gone. For the next few days I searched everywhere.
I was simultaneously dealing with the loss of the watch that so strongly represented my father and my childhood, and the lesson about loss he had taught me. I had always known I would lose this watch someday, either through my own death or some other circumstances. I really had to sit with the feeling and the knowledge of how temporary everything we have is, how it is truly on loan to us. As time went on, I got used to this concept and the inevitable loss that had occurred. Instead of focusing exclusively on the watch, I found other ways I was connected to my father and my childhood. I made peace with my father’s reminder that I, too, would say good-bye to everything someday.
Three months later, I spilled a glass of water on my nightstand. When I leaned over the bed to clean it up, I found the watch. It had fallen behind a bed railing. It is now back on my wrist, but I really understand that all our gifts are temporary. And in this saying good-bye to all, we find something inside ourselves that does not get lost.
Most things we own mean something to us not because of anything actually in the things themselves. Instead, they mean so much to us because of what they represent—and what they represent is ours forever.
Loss is complicated and rarely occurs in a vacuum, and no one can predict the response to loss. Grief is personal. The feelings can be conflicted, delayed, and overwhelming.
One loss, or even one possible loss, touches many lives: the family, the friends, the coworkers, and the health care professionals taking care of the patient. Everybody hurts, even the pets. Everybody feels loss. It can separate us or connect us.
A woman at a seminar was grieving the loss of her husband, not from death but to divorce. Interestingly enough, she explained how their problems had begun while he was battling cancer.
“When he was in the middle of his treatment, I would be awake at night and watch him breathing,” she explained quietly. “I was consumed by the thought of losing him. I would lie awake wondering what I would do the day he stopped breathing. I couldn’t bear the thought of what might happen, of losing him. I eventually had a nervous breakdown and ended up leaving the marriage, out of guilt. It’s years later now, he’s been in great health. I learned from the situation that when someone is facing a life-challenging illness, all the attention is on them. Everything is focused on how they’re doing, how they’re feeling, is the treatment working, etc. I realized I felt so selfish to have my own feelings, my own fears. I never thought to say, ‘Hey, what about me!’ That would have felt wrong. I wasn’t the patient, who was I to need help when he was the one dying? So I kept my mouth shut until I finally cracked.”
Our grief is clearly affected whenever multiple deaths or other circumstances, such as murder, an epidemic, or suddenness, complicate mourning. We may find ourselves “sidetracked” by anger over the circumstances of the death, by shock over its rapidity, and so on. Actually, I believe that all grief is complicated; rarely is it simple.
DKYears ago, during the first stages of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, Edward lost over twenty people that he loved. Yet, at the time, he felt what he considered to be too small a sense of loss. “I loved them,” he said over and over again. “How could I feel so little?”
For fifteen years he was disturbed that he had not felt anything for all those people he had loved and lost. Then one night he suddenly woke up in a panic and frantically searched through the house looking for pictures of those twenty people. All at once, his grief hit like a ton of bricks from out of the blue. He was now strong enough and ready to begin feeling some of those losses, all those feelings that had been saved for him to deal with when he was able to do so.
We experience our losses in our own time and in our own ways. We are given a beautiful grace in denial. We will feel our feelings when it’s time. Meanwhile, they are being held safely for us until we’re ready. This is often true for children or teenagers who lose parents: they may not experience much grief until they become adults and can handle it.
We can’t escape our past. The sorrow of the past is often held in suspense until we are ready for it to find us. Sometimes new losses trigger old ones. And sometimes we don’t feel the loss until later in life, when another loss occurs.
Like many other young war brides of the 1940s, Maurine was devastated when she received a telegram from what was then called the War Department, telling her that her husband was dead.
College sweethearts, she and Roland had hastily married before he enlisted in the army, just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor was bombed. Within a year of their marriage he had finished his training as a fighter pilot and was shipped overseas. Then that telegram arrived.
Instead of mourning, the twenty-one-year-old widow quickly moved to a new state, got a job, and began life anew. Two years after Roland had died, Maurine remarried. Over the next several years she gave birth to three daughters, and her past was all but forgotten. Her new husband knew of her lost love, but she never mentioned anything about Roland to her children or new friends, never hung any pictures of him in her house, and never had any contact with Roland’s family or with friends who had known them both.
Fifty years passed; her second husband took ill and died. Now all her grief, for both husbands, came gushing out, mingled into a single river of tears and pain. To deal with her feelings, she created two picture montages on the living room wall: one for her first love, the other for her second. This finally enabled her to sort through the different feelings and losses she had experienced.
People are often conflicted about the loss of loved ones, especially parents about whom they had mixed emotions. The major block to their dealing with and moving through the loss is that they can’t understand feeling that way about someone they didn’t really like. “My mother was so mean to me,” one woman said. “She was literally a tyrant. Why do I care that she died?”
In a recent film version of Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein gives life to the famous monster without any regard for the creature’s happiness or what his life will be like, dooming him to misery and torment. At the end of the story, when Dr. Frankenstein is finally killed, the creature is found crying. When asked why he is crying for the man who brought him such great suffering, the creature replies simply, “He was my father.”
We mourn for those who cared for us the way they should have. We also mourn for those who did not give us the love we deserved. I’ve seen this phenomenon over and over: the severely beaten child in the hospital longs for his mother but cannot see her, because she is in jail for having beaten him. You can grieve fully for people who were terrible to you. And if you need to grieve for them, you should do so. We must take time to mourn and experience our losses, and to acknowledge that those losses cannot be negated even if we think the person did not deserve our love.
Whether loss is complicated or not, we will all heal in our own time and in our own way. No one can ever tell us we should have been healed by now, or that the process is going too rapidly. Grief is always individualized. As long as we are moving through life and have not become stuck, we are healing.
We often unknowingly re-create losses in an attempt to work through them, to do them better, to finally heal them. If we’ve been hurt by loss, we may find ways to protect ourselves against loss: we detach, we deny, we rescue others, we help them with their hurts so we don’t have to feel ours, we become so self-sufficient that we will never need anyone.
EKRWhen Gillian was about five years old, her parents left her on the steps of an orphanage. Still a young girl, she didn’t see this coming and certainly didn’t understand what it was about. Now a bright, middle-aged woman, she has become emotionally healthy and self-sufficient. She spoke of her early loss and how it’s affected her. She told me she spent much of her life trying to heal that loss, but has now gone on to realize a much more severe problem. “While what I suffered as a child was severe, that was over forty years ago. But I’ve realized in the last twenty years, no one abandons me the way I abandon myself.”
“Can you tell me about that?” I asked.
“For example, I will hope someone will call me to do something on the weekend, but then I either let my machine pick up when they call or if I answer the phone, I instantly start talking about how busy I am. I don’t want them to know how lonely I feel. I never give them a chance to invite me out. And if I have the opportunity to make plans for a holiday, I’ll somehow manage not to commit to anything, then end up being alone and feeling like no one cares for me.”
Why does she do that? We subconsciously put ourselves in situations that remind us of our original losses so that we can heal. Gillian is finally healing; she is realizing that she’s the one who now takes care of her. “I am a forty-eight-year-old woman,” she insists, “an adult, not the little girl who was left at the orphanage anymore. Children can be victims, but I am not a child anymore. It’s my job to make sure I’m doing what I want to do.”
If you wonder why you seem to keep meeting people who abandon you, it may be that the universe is sending you people and situations to help you heal your loss. Eventually, you will heal. In fact, the healing is already under way.
But sometimes the lesson in healing an old loss is in realizing that we can’t prevent new losses. By guarding against loss, we incur loss. We ensure we don’t lose people by keeping them at a distance, but that is a loss in itself.
A married couple was having trouble in their relationship. They both wanted to have children, but the wife kept putting it off. Eventually, it came out that the woman had lost her mother, father, grandfather, and grandmother, all to cancer. She realized that she was unwilling to have children because she was so afraid that she would lose them, or they would lose her. We talked about the fear of loss, pointing out that no one can know the future. And as much as we may want to, we can’t prevent loss, we can’t create a guaranteed loss-free situation.
This woman could adopt children: that might lessen the chances of her children developing cancer, if the tendency toward the disease was hereditary. But what other hereditary problems would they have? And what was to stop them from dying in a traffic accident?
As for herself, she could adopt all kinds of cancer-prevention practices. She could eat well and exercise, she could go in for more-than-regular checkups. But suppose she died in an earthquake, an accident, or a holdup? It’s impossible to find a world where there is no loss. She realized that all of her fears were possible, but not probable. Accepting that we can thrive in an imperfect world that brings about fear, she decided to go ahead and have a baby.
These situations sound like losses in themselves, or at least like new or perceived losses bringing up old ones. They are more than that. They are the creation of healing situations. They bring forth the parts in us now that can heal the loss, that maybe didn’t exist before. They are a necessary visit to an old hurt. They are a turning back to wholeness and reintegration.
Loss is often an initiation into adulthood. Loss makes us real men and real women. Real friends and real husbands and wives. Loss is a right of passage. Through the fire to the other side of life.
DKAs a young boy, I saw my mother fall down just as she was being discharged from the hospital. It frightened me, so I told my mother she should go back in. She looked down at my scared little face and said, “People fall, and then hopefully they get back up. That is life.”
Losses are like falls in many ways. There is something archetypal about loss, whether it is a loss of someone or something, a loss of balance or a fall from grace. We go through the fire. We are changed, something comes out of the fire anew, a diamond no longer in the rough. Society experiences loss, so do families and individuals. At first a family may experience the chaos surrounding a loss. It is dismembered. After the loss it is changed, it is re-membered.
There are many steps to healing loss. Feel and acknowledge the loss when you are ready. Let the grace of denial work, remembering that you will feel your feelings when you are supposed to. You will find the only way out of the pain is through the pain. You will understand it when you are ready to. Many times an understanding of loss comes in years, not days or months. You will find that you can accept a world in which the loss has taken place.
In watching people deal with death you will notice much symbolism. At first, you’ll see people taking lots of photos of themselves, as if to say, “I was here.” Then as their disease progresses, they often come to a new level and quit taking so many photos. They realize even the photo will not last: in the best scenario the pictures will be handed down to the generations to people who never knew them. They find that what matters more is their own hearts and the hearts of their loved ones. They find that part of loss that we can transcend. We can find the genuine parts of ourselves and loved ones that do not get lost. We can even learn that what really matters is eternal and ours forever. The love that you have felt and the love you have given cannot be lost.
DKLate one evening I was on the cancer floor in a hospital, seeing a patient. There, I spoke with a nurse who was devastated because she had just lost a patient. “This is the sixth person I watched die this week!” she complained. “I can’t take it anymore, I can’t watch loss after loss after loss after loss. It feels too bottomless. I don’t know if it will ever end.”
I asked this caring nurse if she could take a few moments to take a walk with me. Before she could reply, I gently grabbed her hand and we walked across a bridge to another wing of the hospital. Turning a corner, we entered the maternity area, where I walked her up to the glass partition that separated us from the newborn babies. I watched her face as she began to look at new life, taking this scene in as if she had never witnessed it before.
“Doing what you do,” I said, “you need to come here often to remind yourself that life is not only about loss.”
Even within our deepest sense of loss, we know that life continues. Despite all the losses and endings that may be bombarding you, new beginnings are all around. In the midst of pain, loss may seem to be never-ending, yet the cycle of life exists all around us. This nurse realized that she had been seeing her work only as loss. She understood that she had forgotten that she was helping to complete the lives that had begun, just like those of these babies, in similar nurseries, many years ago.