Coping with loss
We had a friend die unexpectedly this year. It’s like being punched and winded, shocked with disbelief, then wanting to lash out in anger, but at who? God? Life? There is no easy target for our rage. Then it’s like being punctured, all the joy and purpose and vitality of living drains away, leaving us feeling deflated, demotivated, disoriented.
The only way I know of coping is to draw on our deep reservoir of resilience. Anyone who has gone hiking or camping will know that when the weather or the terrain or some other circumstances turn nasty, when the going gets tough or when things go wrong, we grit our teeth and find a source of strength and endurance and courage we didn’t know we had. We discover that we can suffer and go on, that we can experience setbacks and still find a way home.
For me, that’s what coping with loss is like. It’s not that we don’t feel the pain or the frustration or even the desperation and despair; it’s that we persevere despite the pain, despite the fatigue, despite the confusion. We are resilient. We survive. We cope. We bounce back. We find a pathway back to meaning and vitality. We rediscover life in the shadow of death.
Time is a healer, that is true. But we never lose the scars. There will always be the dull ache of loss. There will always be the terrible gaps of those who were in our lives until they were not. Some losses are small and some are great, but each is an added weight, a pebble or a rock that we carry with us forever. And in some ways, it is a burden we should feel grateful to bear, because it reminds us of the person we have loved and lost.
And when we remember, we start to see through the fog of pain and self-pity to the bright sun of that person’s life. Slowly the mist clears and we feel the warm rays of good memories; we lift our heads and smile as we remember everything we loved about them. We move from mourning their death to celebrating their life. And we treasure even more the love of those who still fill our lives.
Diary entry, 31 March 2018
Memory Stones
The cold is biting, the darkness disorientating
in the hollow caves of loss, the waves
of anger, the shades of sadness, the madness
of life when it rips from the roots, when it
shoots poison arrows and leaves us bleeding
and battered, pleading and shattered, yet
alive, breathing and seething, while breath
was stolen from others, without warning,
without reason, they are dead
The sun still rises, the earth turns, as if
nothing changed; it’s strange, as if
no one noticed the flames, the screaming,
the crashing down of a life, the smashing
to pieces of plans and dreams and what might
have been; the cold, grey ashes of a love
that burned bright and brief, too brief,
now grief is all that’s left, the theft is
complete, the mortal coil is shed
The stones remain, memories from the burning
hearth, the bright blaze of living, the giving
of shape and form to who they were and what
they did, to what we did together, forever
cherished, pebbles in my mind, treasures
yet to find, a weight of shared times and
special places, remembered faces, traces of
adventures and folly, a patterned mosaic,
celebration of a life, enough said.
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