what loss looks like when the shock wears off
My father died suddenly and without warning. On the morning of his death, I was expecting him to walk through our front door at any moment. My bags were packed and waiting on the couch to travel with him to Boston for the weekend. As I played on the floor with my children, I remember feeling surprised that he and my mother were a bit late. Instead my mother opened our door alone, her eyes like I’d never seen them. They’d been walking up our driveway, he stopped and bent over; he stood and took a step. He started to fall and my mother caught him. His eyes were already closed. He was already gone.
There was no good-bye, no moment to even meet his eyes and share an understanding of what was happening. This beloved person who was a most critical weight-bearing beam holding together the structure of my life just vanished.
That was two years ago. But when the earth starts to look and feel it as it did on that morning, all of the freshness of losing him comes back to me. I can feel again the unsteadiness and desperation I felt at his disappearance. My ability to sooth myself weakens and my sadness overwhelms me again. I feel the loss of the life I had before, the person I was before and I feel the roughness of this new life. Change — whether shocking and unwelcome or long-awaited and thrilling, whether it creeps up incrementally or sweeps us away — is so damn uncomfortable when confronted. We feel like a stranger in our own life and touching our emotions jerks us into a turbulent, exhausting whirlwind.
My father died just as spring was beginning to unfurl its glory in the Blue Ridge Mountains where I live. Before his death spring was my- and his- favorite. We’d look forward to it all winter, like a childhood anticipation of Christmas morning. But for the last two years I’ve just been trying to get through it. Head down, plow through it, hating how painful everything still felt. This year, however, I began to feel that old familiar anticipation of spring’s arrival. I could breathe in the return of birdsong and golden evening light. But now equal to that enjoyment is such painful sadness over my father’s loss and longing for time that has passed. I feel waves of the trauma of that first morning break over me and in touch with that part of my heart that will now always be broken.
It is strange to be ok and not ok at the same time. To feel happiness and pain so tightly bound together. Death is the great kahuna of change, the ultimate transition. My husband, the Buddhist, says all the Buddhist teachings are essentially preparation for death. But surviving most of life’s changes and transitions require us to hold together powerful opposing emotions: my overpowering adoration for my newborn and my stunning depression at losing my freedom; my joy at marrying my love, my fear that I would fuck it up; my thrill at a new work opportunity and my anxiety that I will fail and be criticized.
Lots of the time it is easy to pretend that things aren’t changing; we aren’t changing; our life isn’t moving by; everything is steady and ok. But sometimes our world shifts undeniably, unearthing its inherent impermanence. A beloved dies or we break up with our partner, we lose or leave a job or have a baby. We move or a dream we nurtured must be surrendered. We notice with undeniable clarity one day that our life isn’t looking the way we imagined. Sometimes change/newness is standing right in front of us and it’s so big there’s just no place else to look but right into its face. I mean, we can look away but that thing is just going to climb onto our back and press us into the ground with its weight. And at some point we’ll hardly be able to breathe under its burden. We have a choice: to step toward our discomfort at the newness upon us, to welcome in the barrage of emotions that come with that, or to freeze and push away, to tamp down any feelings of being not ok.
When we feel unanticipated change occurring, there is a breath when we think, “oh, this is hard. I’m extremely uncomfortable and vulnerable.” And even though it’s frightening, I’m inclined to seize that instant of awareness of my discomfort as an opening. That moment of realization can be a moment of opportunity. There is a space there to harden up, put your head down and pretend you’re fine. Or you can hold your ground. You can breathe, you feel your feelings. And you can reach out for support and tools to find your ground. You can blaze a path of caring for yourself and honesty and messing up and forgiving.
Something has happened to me as I’ve tried to put this into practice day by day, moment by moment. I feel deepening gratitude. I feel such an awake love for this life. Don’t get me wrong- I also feel furious and afraid and lost. I’m not doing it perfectly by any means. But perfection is not a standard based on real life and I’m tired of trying to live up to it.
