A Lesson on Loss
When nothing becomes everything.
When we experience these things, we tend to rationalize in our minds that we come back to it when we are ready. I’m writing this as the circle closes again and I relapse into unrelenting emotion. Maybe it is when we least feel ready that such moments of compulsion are spurred. So here goes nothing…
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Four months ago, I lost something important to me. It caused the most searing pain I’d ever felt, physical or mental. Maybe I was fortunate in that I haven’t had to feel anything like that before (or since), but where I was not fortunate were in the events that followed—a continuous string of losses that upended literally every part of my life.
Some of you will know I am fond of using natural phenomena as metaphors to describe the unnatural things that happen in my life. I’m kicking myself that I hadn’t saved apocalypse and nuclear fallout. What am I supposed to use now? Supermassive blackholes?
I sought a therapist for the third time in my adult life. Mood-tracking was no longer enough, so I started journaling. I started walking at the local park almost everyday. When I’m not walking, I run. I’ve come back to religion and a regular study group for guidance. I’ve grown closer and been more vulnerable to the people that have remained in my orbit. (Rather, who have let me remain in theirs.) I’ve started pursuing other, bigger things, things that take me out of myself for a while. In between these things, I’m still on my bike.
So far, so good—a fairly standard narrative of redemption. The bad thing happens, the good thing follows. If you’ve never suffered deep loss in your life, you’d be surprised to learn, as was I, that the bad thing actually doesn’t go away, especially if your neurological disposition is such that it keeps the bad thing on your mind at virtually all times.
These four months and counting have had some shining moments and excitement here and there—nonetheless, this is, categorically-speaking, a Bad Time™️ for me. If the literal weather outside my window is any indication, I am very well in the thick of it.
A peek into my journal will show you anything but a fairly standard narrative of redemption. It is cyclical, frustrating. Moments of violent eruption, followed by still waters in mere days, to be followed by a frantic and resentful questioning of the universe, with no answers in sight, to then be followed by some sudden revelation… followed all too abruptly by another day of pain. To find meaning in it, a story, is to wring a desert stone.
Four months of this back and forth has made me battle-weary—“burned out on emotion” according to a June entry. My latest entry sees “tired” six times. To a lot, I fought in silence, while to an unfortunate few, I have been anything but.
My lesson on loss, I guess, is this… Nothing stays the same. And everything around you now will not be there one day.
You can do the things I did—in fact, please do. Seek help, seek community, exercise (or let yourself go?), meditate, lose yourself in listening to music, playing music, watch days’ worth of Dr K and Smosh on YouTube—exhaust your list of options. Modern life, as we’re all too aware, has enabled some terrible things (I think that’s what this might’ve been about at one point), but it has given us access to a greater number of good things at the same time, should you seek it.
Just know this… you’re gonna carry that weight a long time. You can chip at it, you can sand the edges and make it hurt less, gnaw at it like an animal, you can even talk to it. About the only thing you can’t do is make it go away.
The same way our physical body ages and gathers spots and scars and aches, I think our souls collect and remember certain pains—permanent pains. Pains that will every now and again conjure its brethren like shame, regret, and what-if’s (the worst of the bunch, imo), things that make you question the point of keeping on when you find yourself back on square one.
And in the same way our physical body is finite, so is our soul. I had therapy the other week and talked in circles for half an hour just to realize the thing I’d been feeling was simply exhaustion. Even after all the fighting I could muster, after all the dust had settled, the pain remains. (Like a pulsating black orb, if you will. Now there’s a deep cut.)
Maybe it’s meant to remain. Maybe I’ll take it to my grave. Maybe something so unfathomably remarkable and euphoric has to happen that I magically forget it ever happened and things can make sense again. I don’t know what lies ahead, and I can’t ever know.
All I know is that whatever good—God willing, greatness—is in store, there will always still be bad. Granted even the best case scenario, that I live a long life, this pain is just the beginning for me. I will only stand to lose more things. I will lose more people. I will lose more deeply as more important things and more important people vanish from the fabric of my reality, leaving deeper and deeper voids in their wake. (Maybe “blackholes” was right.)
I hope as these things come to pass that the pains of past loss will have become scar tissue, mere reminders, and not just remain bleeding, aching wounds, as they are now. Even so… I hope I never start missing the silver linings for the dark clouds.
For now, I remain. Eyes fixed to the stars. To see where to next.
Let us all remain, until we don’t.
“We are synchronized, now forever. I love you.”
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I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a couple of things that inspired me to write this…
These poems on grief put this piece in my drafts in the first place.
This piece on death finally took it over the finish line. “...continuing to simply live is both my act of protest and celebration.”