Loss leads to grieving and the reward for having lost and therefore having had to grieve is gain, such is the natural order of all things in the natural realm.
There is no loss without gain, there is no gain without loss and the grieving is the period of digestion and evaluation. It’s the time period given over to you to wallow in self-pity, to agonise over what went wrong, to put yourself through the ‘guilt’ thing. In the case of a lost ‘love’ you need a period of weeping and longing; a time to agonise over the fact that he or she is no longer in love with you and that soon they will find a new partner better than you and that in doing so they will have a better life than the one you offered.
All these thoughts and agonies you must weather in order to survive that most terrible of ordeals. But it’s not just a broken heart that delivers such agony. There is the loss of a loved one or an elderly parent, an illness stricken sibling or the worst of all for all parents, the loss of a child. These are times when we struggle to make sense of the situation somehow and hopefully that will be the end result.
Sadly, there are far too many of us that just don’t get it and we end up wasting the experience altogether. We are bewildered by the loss, that always seems to come out of nowhere, when we least expect it. But then when you think about it, when do you ever expect the loss? In most cases never – unless you are one of those eternal pessimists who is always expecting the worst. Most of us will eventually come to the realisation that this loss and grieving will always allow us to gain later in life, whether we are told or we read about it or we come to ‘see’ it through the observation of our own lives. But as so often is the case, we will only come to see it and accept it as a truth later in life – not in our youth when it would serve us well if we could but see it.
Part of ‘the wisdom’ I believe, is that few of us will ever discover these ‘truths’ while we are young. Why don’t we learn these things at an earlier age thus saving ourselves a lot of bother? I believe the answer to this common mystery is that we need to ‘experience’ as much of life, for ourselves, as is humanly possible. Granted, there are some things we can learn about purely from reading about them in books or accessing information through the computer – but some fundamental lessons can and should be only learned ‘the hard way’ from the school of hard knocks.
The dictionary defines loss as “the act or instance of losing, detriment or disadvantage resulting from losing. It defines grief as deep and intense sorrow or mourning. Come to grief, or meet with disaster, thus to grieve.”
How many times have you heard “for a door to open, first one must close” or “there must be an end to something, for something else to begin?” These and other well-worn clichés are the good advice given by friends and loved ones when we experience loss.
There are of course, many different forms of loss – the loss of the object of our love, the girlfriend or boyfriend, the loss of a family member due to illness or old age, the loss of a lifestyle after a divorce or a business venture fails, the loss of a period or a phase of our life or the passing of our ‘childhood’ that we experience when we leave school. Nobody prepared me for the deep sadness that I endured after leaving school. Little did I know that I would ‘grieve’ the loss of those carefree days and the passing of those young years. I now realise that the ‘grieving’ lasted for a long time in my case because my school years allowed me to hide from the responsibilities waiting for me in the big, wide, wonderful and sometimes frightening world. My home life was one of chaos; periods of peace and calm followed by terrible periods of fear, anger, arguing and violence. Tears and sorrow always followed loss, grief and although not realised then – gain.
The loss of innocence is one of the hardest to bear let alone understand. Victims of childhood abuse, physical, mental or sexual, have a terrible time trying to deal with that loss. Children are not prepared or educated to deal with such a tragic and all-encompassing loss. The grieving that follows lasts for years and in some cases lasts well into adulthood and even then may never be properly dealt with. What this so clearly demonstrates is the real need for all of us to accept loss and grieving as a natural part of life, so that we are not bowed and crippled by the process.
We need to get back to the ‘tribal’ way of educating ourselves and our children, that loss, grief and gain go hand in hand; that loss and grief are not to be feared but to be accepted, if not welcomed, into our everyday lives. We will experience loss, grief and gain in all manner of ways: small day to day stuff, medium life influencing stuff and large life changing stuff; but all the levels are beyond our control and the sooner we learn to accept, the sooner and the easier we can get on with the business of living the experience that we are given. After all, every new experience is a gift of or from the Divine.
I’ll leave you with this Sufi saying: ”While the heart weeps for what it has lost, the soul rejoices for what it has found.”
Go with your God.
Your friend, Angry.