The Power in Loss

"..The way we deal with those losses, large and small, can really help or get in the way of the way we deal with the rest of our lives, with what we have. Right? Not just what we've lost." (Krista Tippet interviewing Dr. Naomi Remen, medical director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program.)

How, then, do you deal with loss? Loss of a dream, an expectation, a piece of skin, a child? What do you do when the ground falls beneath your feet, you have no answers only questions, you find pain where once you found comfort and pleasure?

Over the years, I have "dealt" with loss in many different ways including denial, over striving, drugs, food, rage, continual motion, dreams, thinking, self-loathing, and escape. In each of these ways, I have treated loss as some kind of abnormality in my life, some great misdeed, or mistake I have made or an injustice by an enemy against me. Each of these strategies can offer temporary numbness and balm but in the end just serves to intensify my fear of loss which is really a fear of living fully with openness to what is. In these ways of coping with loss, I cling with vice grips on weak limbs, unable to open my palms to feel the next gust of wind, the rain, the penetrating sun, a friends hand.

There is a new way, I am learning, in which the inevitable losses can be experienced, acknowledged, and honored for the powerful healing, humility, and connection that they offer. Our experience of loss, afterall, is what makes us human, is what enables me to see the woman who serves me coffee as myself, the tears of a mother half way around the world my own. More so than our pleasure, the pain of loss brings us into the truth of our vulnerability and dependence on each other. And that knowledge alone can melt a thousand years of hatred if it is allowed to breath.

This new way, the sages tell us, requires us to enter the pain of loss, hold the wound with the same tenderness that you hold an infant, to trust that there is a ground beneath the emptiness, light to penetrate the darkness.

There are more questions than answers in this place of loss. But, as Naomi Remen has written, "I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions, and those questions have helped me to live better than any answers I might find."