Friday, March 9, 2007
On Losing Someone you Love
I realize that one of the 'things' that happen as we get older is that we seem to confront loss much more frequently. Yesterday, one conversation revolved around a discussion with a friend who said he'd lost 4 friends in their 50's to 4 different types of Cancer. So Sad. Another conversation was about a man who just lost his 49 yr. old wife to Breast Cancer last November. Also Sad beyond imagination. My question is this...how do we go through great pain and come back to the place where we are happy and courageous and can move through the pain with dignity and grace, honoring those we lose. I hear about all these losses, and I think...I can surely move quickly past my own pain at losing my beloved cat, Simba, who passed away yesterday. Do I blame the bad Doctor who made two crucial errors last month? Do I blame myself for being in LA when he got sick again? Do we need to blame anyone? Does that give more comfort or more pain? We always go through that what if stage...what if i was home? What if I had chosen a more exerienced specialist? And...then...you never know. You only know that you are sad...and smarter for next time. Between meetings I'd sneak up to my room and do a mix of meditating and crying and then get back out there. Now... I know that losing a pet is not like losing a spouse, a child etc. But I do wonder how people deal with loss-- how they move through the day when they are feeling heavy with pain. If we want to connect more deeply, our mourning will be more deep as well. This is the unfortunate result of loving deeply. Do you have thoughts on this?
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3 comments:
A few years ago I lost a very close friend and relative to breast cancer.
We were about four years apart. Growing up together we weren't that close (a four year age difference when you're a teenager feels like decades). We reconnected when we were both in our early 40's, and our relationship strengthened with each succeeding year. We were both divorced, and had children about the same age. She became someone I could easily laugh with and confide in; a presence in my life that I may have in some ways taken for granted. I visited her about a month before she passed away. She was clearly in pain, but as was her style, she never complained, and laughed about her condition (she called herself the 'human petri dish') This is the person I remember now. Even now, I still cannot delete her name from my IM buddy list, and in many ways I may not have emotionally come to terms with her death...and then again, maybe I don't have to. I am not an innately spiritual person, but I feel her presence with me every day...especially in those moments when I start to feel sorry for myself I think...'she would never let me get away w/this, get a grip schmuck, move on.' And then I laugh. Her daughter has blossomed into a strong, vibrant young woman, who, like her mother, is planning to study music. These internal and external 'signs' of sorts, provides me a path to move beyond the sorrow, and remember and learn from those things that made her the person that I loved (and still love) so deeply.
In 1978 I lost my younger sister. She was 20 and in the overseas program in London with Syracuse University. There was a gas leak in the apartment she lived in and she was in the bathtub at the time. I watched my parents go through the unimaginable pain. And every day my mother pulled herself together and walked out of the house with her head held high. Honestly, I don't know how she did it. As for me, my mantra was to "be strong for my parents", so I never really grieved until many years later. One way I resolved my own pain was to be there for friends in their grief. It was my way of transforming my pain into something positive. And when people ask me how to deal with it my suggestion is to do your best to really be in the moment, whatever pain that brings. If you deny it you will only deal with it later. If you honor your feelings and emotions it will get better. I can't say when, or what triggers the change, but one day you wake up and the heaviness is a little less. And the next think you know is the pain gives way to happy memories and you only smile when you think of those you lost.
The only way I have ever known of dealing with grief is to go through it - not around it, above it or under it. And yes, eventually you have memories, which is evidence of a life and its impact on those that survive. I think it's human nature to want to make sense of senseless things like losing someone you love, so we try reasoning (i.e. maybe it was something I did or didn't do that could have prevented it) I'm sure you know the Kubler-Ross stages of anger, denial, acceptance, et al. After my mother died I was given her fur coat, which I wear on only the coldest days and always feel protected and wrapped in her arms. I's oversize, which also seems like her somehow. Time can transform grief into something close to the essence of love.
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