Loss is living with the presence of absence

My grandmother passed away a few months ago. Even though she isn’t around physically anymore, but my family and I still talk about her every now and then.

This piece of information can be interpreted differently depending where your focus is. It could be either on the incident itself (i.e., my grandmother’s death), or the meaning behind it (i.e., I lost a grandmother forever). Focusing on the incident itself offers us the illusion of death being a temporal thing, and our lives must go on after death. On the other hand, emphasizing on the meaning behind it reminds us of that we’ve lost something and our lives will no longer be the same.

Even though death and loss typically come hand in hand, we often focus on the incident more than the meaning behind it. As a result, we can become frustrated at ourselves as to why haven’t we moved on since an event (the death of something), forgetting that death entails losing something permanently, and it’s a reality that we may need to reconcile daily.

Time passes, things change, but memories remain.

It’s important to recognize the nuances between death and loss because every physical death involves a loss, but not every loss includes a physical death. In fact, non-death losses happen frequently. They include losing anything significant to one’s physical, psychological, spiritual and interpersonal lives. Some examples of non-death losses are losing a best friend who used to be single and recently got married, changes in the perception of self and the world after a significant incident, making a difficult decision to forgo an imagined future, so on and so forth. Unlike death of a person, these losses are usually minimalized by the person experiencing it and the people around. Whenever we experience these losses, we tend to question ourselves and assume that we are the problem, thus carry the responsibility to address the emotional imbalances within us.

Dealing with loss can feel like you got hit by a bus, and you're done with life.

Human beings are resilient. We expect ourselves to bounce back after facing life-changing situations, and we carry the same belief and perception in dealing with loss. However, the problem about loss is not about finding replacements to fill the hole in our heart or ease our pain as quick as possible. In some situations, the harder we try to do something to suppress or push our pain away, the worse we’ll feel. It’s never about getting rid of the pain and move on with our lives as if nothing happened.

Dealing with loss is about learning to live life acknowledging the absence of what we used to love or rely on. Loss is about discovering and honor the unique value of the lost item. We hardly realize the value of things until its gone. It’s about learning to tap into our own resources within us, trusting that we already have the resilience needed for our own healing to comfort ourselves in this season of pain. It’s going to feel chaotic, distressing and being out of our own comfort zone. As time passes, we will be able to love once again while being mindful of the fact that everything will come to an end one day. So that we can treasure every moment without taking things for granted in life.

Absorbing every moment of sunrise at Mt. Batur

The reality of life is loss is inevitable because life is finite. Loss is always painful; it has to hurts because we’ve once opened our heart and soul to it. The overwhelming and unpleasant grief that comes after experiencing a loss is normal and perhaps lifelong. Author Jamie Anderson wrote that grief is love that has nowhere else to go. As long as we’re unable to retrieve back the thing that we’ve lost, the impact of loss will always be in us.

Some questions to reflect:

1. What are some death or non-death losses you've experienced recently?

2. How did a loss impact you and how did you deal with it?

3. What are some things/people/experience that you can be mindful of its presence, so that you can be more appreciative of?