Friday, September 11, 2015

On Loss

If the fourth Thursday in November is Americans' day for thanksgiving, then today, September 11th, has become our day for grieving. Our national loss is inescapable, whether it's in the reflecting pools, or the changed NY skyline, or in the first-responders doing stair-runs today.

Many, many people have written about our national loss, most better than I ever could. But today I've been mulling other kinds of loss, our inability to recognize them, and our collective discomfort with them.

I can hear you now - "Oh, no, I'm not uncomfortable with loss! I accept it as an integral part of life!" I'm going to beg to differ. I think most of us are, myself included. Part of it is the way we've decreed that loss = death, and refuse to see, acknowledge, and mourn the other losses in our lives.

Yes, death is the most obvious bereavement. And I will say that we are probably, as a society, getting better at accepting the grief that goes along with a loved one's death. We are far from perfect, though, particularly if the death is "uncomfortable": a suicide, or an overdose, or the death of a child.

But death is not the only way we experience loss. There's a fantastic bit at the end of the Harry Potter series. Harry is watching the train pull away with both his sons in it, and walks beside it for a bit, "watching his son's thin face, already ablaze with excitement. Harry kept smiling and waving, even though it was like a little bereavement, watching his son glide away from him...."

And that's it, exactly. We suffer these bereavements all the time, but we're scared to label them as such. The loss of a marriage. A job. That sweet infant that slept in our arms, and is now the teenager who's leaving our home as fast she can. The dreams that we had for our children, as they are replaced by their own dreams. The parent who now needs the help and care they once gave us. We don't allow ourselves to grieve these things, even in our heart-of-hearts. We think that we need to cope, handle it, deal with it, move on, etc. And even when a sympathetic soul tells us, "Wow, that's hard. I'm sorry," we tend to blow of the sympathy. "Yes, but it has to be done." "Yes, but we're co-parenting." "Yes, but now I'll go into consulting." Yes, but. Never just, "Yes, it is hard."

I have struggled with many of these. Yes, I've struggled with death. I lost my mother way too early, and the pain and memories may lessen, but they never fade entirely; I lost my father way too recently, and that pain and those memories are still sharp enough sometimes to leave me breathless.

But there are other losses.

Some are conflicted. My step-son, bio-son, and bio-daughter are all close in age, so we will go from a family of 5 to empty-nesters in span of 3 years. Each one will be its own bereavement (my step-son's has already happened), but each one is also an opportunity to sit back and bask in some parental glory at how well they've turned out. My two step-daughters are either out or nearly out of college, and are leading independent lives. Again, parental basking ensues...but we don't see them like we used to, and that's hard.

And then there are the less conflicted ones. My children (bio and step) have grown up within divorce; they have lost their birth families, and I grieve their losses. My son has a chronic illness; I grieve for his loss of taking his health for granted. My daughter's childhood and "tweenhood" were marked by anxiety and depression, which she still struggles with. I grieve for the loss of a carefree childhood for her. And, yes, along with the grief, there is anger, and guilt, and a feeling that I should've done more, or differently, or better.

One of my favorite scenes in Inside Out was when Bing Bong was grieving toddler-Riley-that-was; Joy tried to force him to be happy, but Sadness...just sat with him. And that was what he needed. Those feelings of guilt and anger and sadness that go along with loss are hard to sit with, but sometimes that's just what we need.

Because when we just sit with them, we can possibly find a way to live with them. That doesn't mean a fatalistic or apathetic acceptance; my daughter is in therapy to ease her issues; my son has lobbied on Capitol Hill for IBD research; my husband and I have worked to make our blended family as successful as possible, without ignoring either birth family.

But I think it does mean that we give ourselves the time and space, either physically or metaphysically, to grieve, to be scared, to be guilty, to be angry. And then we act. Because too frequently, when we act immediately, we only make things worse.

I spent the first couple of years after my son's diagnosis trying to make sure he ate, and ate a lot (one of the effects of his condition is that his gut doesn't absorb nutrients as it should). He hated it; he doesn't like protein shakes, protein powder, carnation instant breakfast, or any other dietary suggestions we were given. I worried, and guilted myself, but he was thirteen, and short of hospitalizing him, there wasn't much I could do to make him eat. This summer, I made a comment to him that if I had pushed harder at the beginning, I thought he would be and inch or two taller than he is, and probably more muscular as well.

He replied, "Yes, but I'd probably hate you." My son is frequently smarter than I am.

I was not sitting with my feelings about his illness; I was trying to jump in and do, and fix, and manage. Because just sitting with the reality was terrifying. He forced me to sit with it when I wasn't ready to, because it was what was right for him. And in the end, the balance between doing and sitting was not only what was right for him, in the long run, it's what was right for me, as well.

My friend Bruce Reyes-Chow, a Presbyterian minister, wrote the following prayer last September 11th:

Every September 11th
my soul wrestles with loss, anger and guilt.

May my loss become compassion, not hate
May my anger become advocacy, not revenge
May my guilt become action, not apathy

God, let us all know Your peace.

AMEN.

(original link here)

That prayer speaks to me in many ways as I sit with my losses, both large and small. Add debilitating fear in with the hatred, revenge, and apathy, and that's what I worry my losses will become. It's hard to be compassionate, to advocate, and to act. Sometimes it's nearly impossible. It's easier to hate, whether it's an illness, or a person, or God, or Fate; to want to "make it right" rather than make it better; and it's certainly easier to do nothing than to do something. But too much of that sort of ease, and I'd become someone I'm really not comfortable being.

So on this day of grief, I wish that we all are able to name our losses, both the large and the small, and that we are also able to find the space to sit with them. That space may be with a loved one, on a mountain, in a place of worship, in meditation...it really doesn't matter. But let us act with compassion for ourselves and others as we struggle with all the losses in our lives.



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