Living with Loss
Rev. Mary Samuels
January 25, 2004
A poem by Rudolph Nemser (from 100 Meditations)
The boy was young (your son, my son)
He held life,
Gentle and fragile as a wren’s spotted egg,
In play-black-lined hands.
He brought it to me.
His eyebrows asked: What?…..
What does it mean
To hold your life with your fingers?
How should I tell him how to live?
How do you tell someone you love
Humanity is frail (as he is frail, as you are frail)
And mistakes will be made
And life is fitting parts that don’t belong together?
Each of us knows what it means to hold our life in our own hands. Each of us has experienced that mystery of fitting parts that don’t belong together. Because each one of us is frail, none of us are strangers to loss. Indeed, loss is an encompassing theme in human life. “For we lose not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on.”(Viorst, Judith. Necessary Losses, p.16)“We lose friendships, dreams, opportunities, ability, independence, homes, communities, youth, love”(Rev. Kathy Riegelman, “Ministering in Times of Grief and Loss: A Ministry of Authentic Presence”, Oct 2003).** These losses are a part of life- universal and unavoidable. But as an eight year old in the congregation commented, “Losing sucks” and no matter what our age, I think we would agree that loss is difficult and often painful to bear.
There’s a story from the Middle East called The Lost Key: “One night a neighbor strolling by Nasrudin’s house found him outside under the street lamp brushing through the dust. ‘Have you lost something, my friend?’ he asked. Nasrudin explained that he had lost his key and asked the neighbor to help him find it. After some minutes of searching and turning up nothing, the neighbor asked him, ‘Are you sure you lost the key here?’ Nasrudin answered ‘No, I did not lose it here. I lost it inside the house’. The neighbor stopped, looked at him and said ‘If you lost the key in the house, Nasrudin, why are you looking for it out here?’ “Well, there’s more light out here, of course,” Nasrudin replied. It was easier for Nasrudin to look where it was well lit for his key even though he knew it wasn’t really there. Well-lit places are the safe activities of life, the busyness, the preoccupations that keep us from feeling the loss of someone or something. We keep busy, we deny so our minds won’t go to the emptiness, the feeling of being bereft. I have often looked for keys in the wrong places…sometimes not even aware of what loss I was avoiding.
Loss comes in a multitude of forms….I will name a few. First is material loss, an object or surroundings to which one has a strong attachment; a woman’s pair of earrings, a man’s favorite outdoor hat- their loss is out of proportion to their value because these concrete things carry memories. My daughter had a pink and white baby quilt that she dragged everywhere. By the time she started having overnights in second grade, her’blanki’ was in shreds. After her girl friend made fun of it, she decided she couldn’t keep it in her room anymore but she wasn’t ready to get rid of it. I suggested she put it in a drawer in the basement. I promptly forgot about it. On her 34th birthday, my daughter told me that as a child she would periodically go to the drawer, open it, look at her blanket but not touch it and close the drawer. Ever the mother, I asked her if that arrangement had worked for her. “Oh sure, Mom, she.casually said. “I guess I needed to let my blanket go away slowly,” she said.
Second, there is intrapsychic loss, like the dying of a dream or the experience of losing an emotionally important image of oneself. Do you remember when you knew you had left your childhood behind? Third, there is functional loss, as in losing some of the muscular or neurological functions of the body, temporary or permanent. Fourth, there is a role loss as in retirement, or a promotion, which is both a gain and can elicit grief. Fifth, there is systemic loss, a loss in a pattern of living, such as when a young adult leaves home. Sixth, there is relationship loss, as in a friendship that dissolves or death, the most intense form of relationship loss.(Ibid, list of losses) Because loss comes in so many forms, they can pile up, one loss triggering memories of other losses. A friend’s father died, and all she could talk about was her dog who died three months earlier. She had to get through her grief about the loss of her dog before she could talk about her father. There’s actually a word to describe the cumulative effect of loss-‘entranement’- where losses are all hooked together like the cars on a train and sometimes they pile up. …sometimes it takes just one small loss to make us feel like a train wreck.
In the face of loss, do we only have one choice: to die when the person or the dream dies, to die when our old self passes away, to live crippled? Or to forge, out of pain and memory, new adaptations? The author Ian Frazier in his novel Cold Mountain believes the choice is that clear, though certainly not simple. Separated by the Civil War, the two main characters Inman and Ada meet up toward the end of the story. Through a long night, he told her about the war. The author writes:
“He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use; there was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on…you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You’re left with your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you.”
It is not always possible to make the clear choice that the character implies. The psychotherapist, Pauline Boss, specializes in ambiguous loss, the kind that is surrounded by uncertainty, waiting and wondering, as when a loved one is suffering from Alzheimer’s or you have lost family members to divorce, or a soldier is missing in action. In these instances, the loss can’t be resolved because it’s ongoing. As Boss says, it is difficult to “live with ambiguity with resilience”(Ambiguous Loss, p. 86).
And so we grieve, we mourn because we experience loss. Because human life is marked by the twin necessities of attachment and separation, there is no life without grief. No life without the normal but bewildering cluster of emotions that crash together in the face of loss….. fear and anxiety, guilt and shame, anger, sadness and despair. But many approach grieving with preconceived notions. After all, we have been schooled in the stages of grief. You’ve heard them: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance or some other construct. I found 8 different models of grieving. … as if we just had these steps to go through and that would be enough- a marker when we can say, oh, she’s done. But have you tried to console someone and they are not consoled? As one poet wrote:
Console if you will, I can bear it,
T’is a well-meant alms of breath;
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made death other than death.
Grief is not something to get over nor does time necessarily heal all wounds. A common misconception is that we grieve for one year and that on the anniversary of the death, we will be back to “normal” This is a dangerous concept as it can promote a sense of failure and concern for everyone. In reality, grief will demand the time it needs and will require our active participation in order to promote healing. It is wise to remember that the grief of others is not our grief- it is a thing apart and may look very different than our own. Louise Erdrich wrote, “Some people grieve by holding fast to the love of others, some by rejecting all companionship. Some grieve with tears and some with dry howls. Some grieve like water, some burn. Some are fuel for the fire of sorrow and some are stone…pure slate, dark and impenetrable”(The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, p. 34). Whatever way it appears, grief cannot be avoided. It will eventually demand our attention, no matter how long we try to put if off. The poet Denise Levertov explains this in her poem “Talking to Grief”
Ah, grief, I should not treat you
Like a homeless dog
Who comes to the back door
For a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.
I should coax you
Into the house and give you:
Your own corner,
A worn mat to lie on,
Your own water dish.
You think I don’t know
You’ve been living
Under my porch.
You long for your real place to be
Readied
Before winter comes.
You need your name,
Your collar and tag.
You need the right to warn off
Intruders,
To consider my house your own
And me your person
And yourself
My own dog.
Grief never wholly ends because memories and images do not disappear from our minds except in severe memory loss. What we have invested in our past, as in a former marriage, cannot be thrown out and forgotten, nor should it be. Through mourning we come to accept the difficult changes that loss brings. Let us not forget the loss entirely but let that object or person ‘go’ sufficiently to make new attachments. My stumbling blocks in grieving were an existential yearning for wholeness…as if I just had to find that last puzzle piece, put it in its place and the puzzle picture would be whole and complete. But life is fitting parts that don’t belong together…and often creating something new with what remains. Life is learning to be at ease with solutions that are imperfect. Life is repair, renewal and recovery, complete with scars. I am reminded of a poem by Rabbi Harold Schulweis to end this reflection:
We have seen Yitzhak Perlman
Who walks the stage with braces on both legs on two crutches
He takes his seat, unhinges the clasps of his legs,
Tucking one leg back, extending the other,
Laying down his crutches, placing the violin under his chin.
On one occasion one of his violin strings broke.
The audience grew silent but the violinist didn’t leave the stage.
He signaled the maestro, and the orchestra began its part.
The violinist played with power and intensity on only three strings.
With three strings, he modulated, changed, and
Recomposed the piece in his head.
He retuned the strings to get different sounds,
Turned them upward and downward.
The audience screamed delight, applauded their appreciation
Asked later how he had accomplished this feat,
The violinist answered:
It is my task to make music with what remains.
Complete the song left for us to sing, transcend the loss
Play it out with heart, soul and might
With all remaining strength within us.
May we go forth and make music with what remains.
**I am indebted to Kathy Riegelman’s presentation at PSD-UUMA Fall, 2003 retreat as the impetus for the sermon.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth
Promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person