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Reflection 5 - Loss

8/25/2009 7:44:24 PM

Sooner or later, every person who lives will experience loss and it will touch every facet of our lives. Some losses will be minor; we’ll process them and get on with life. Others will turn our world upside-down and challenge our deepest held beliefs.

When we’re in the process of transition—going through a time of deep personal transformation—losses hit us particularly hard. They have to; it’s part of growing and we can’t avoid the intensity of pain if we’re to move on in life. We may be able to sidestep the pain temporarily, through preoccupation with food, alcohol, television, work, relationships, etc., but unless we want to stay stuck in a half-lived existence, we will need to make a conscious choice to embrace the pain.

Losses make us ask deep questions and it doesn’t matter if we ask them in confusion, doubt or anger. The important thing is that we ask them.

But we can’t stop there. If we do, we stand in danger of being stuck in cynicism or despair. We have to believe we’ll receive an answer of some kind. We have to be waiting for it. It may not come right away; in fact, it probably won’t. If we were spoon-fed answers in order to alleviate our pain, the journey would be short-circuited. There’d be no reason to walk it.

Loss is our most painful but potent teacher. We learn through loss that the physical things of this life can’t give us life. We learn this by losing what matters and then, continuing to live.

Shortly after I turned 29 and my sister turned 30, she suddenly died. In many ways, she had become my best friend. I’d called her every day during my break at work, and we’d talked about our lives and dreams. To lose her was like losing a part of me.

All of us have felt the terrible isolation that comes with loss; the feeling that we’re entombed in grief and pain that no one else can understand. When I returned to work (typist in a state office building), I completed my regular duties but I did them automatically. I wasn’t alive. I walked and talked and interacted, but the ‘me’ who felt and cared and was glad to be alive, had gone into hiding and I didn’t know how to call her back.

One day during break, when I normally would’ve called my sister, I went to the snack bar located several floors up in our large office building. As I stood in line with others, lost in my own world of thought, I felt a hand touch my arm. A woman, whom I’d never seen, had elbowed her way through the others in line. Looking at me with compassion, she asked, ‘Are you the one who lost her sister?’

Numb with grief and unable to speak, I only nodded. “I know how you feel,” she replied. “I lost my sister, too.”

In another situation, those words ‘I know how you feel’ could’ve bounced off my armor, trite and meaningless. But not this day. This was different. A gift out of nowhere, they penetrated my pain and jolted my heart back to life. For the first time since my sister’s death, I felt connected to life because I knew someone else understood my pain. That woman disappeared into the crowd and I never saw her again. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have known her. But I have never forgotten what she did.

A random act of kindness? Or—is there the possibility that the Heavens sent this woman to me? I can’t tell you what to think, but I have come to believe that nothing in our lives is random.

Now almost 31 years later, I know that even without my sister, I’m complete. I know this because I chose to continue to live and to find the journey worth doing. This realization only came with time and through many other losses. I couldn’t grasp this truth at the time of her death.

Losses occur throughout life, but when we find ourselves grieving so deeply we don’t understand what’s happening to us, that may be a signal we’re experiencing the loss from the standpoint of transition. In transition, grief doesn’t seem to lessen with the passage of time; it swamps us with its intensity. The loss isn’t experienced normally, but as one that throws our whole world into question and doubt.

We might also have processed a major loss earlier in our lives and find years later we’re experiencing it all over again. This happens as we move through the different phases of our lives. What was settled in one phase will need to be brought out into the light and experienced again from a different perspective.

If you feel you’re in the midst of such a loss, it might help to ask: what has this loss done to the way I experience life? Has it made me feel as though the world isn’t the place I thought it was? Has it shaken my faith in the way God works in my life; has it shaken my faith in God? Has it made the world seem uncertain, not as safe or predictable as it was before?

Please feel comfortable sharing your stories with me. What you’re experiencing may not be as strange as you think it is. It might help you to know that your pain has a reason, and that your well-being and spiritual growth is at the heart of it.