Mourning Loss
When the sun rises on acceptance
A few days ago, I was watching my tears blend with the water washing over me in the shower and it hit me; I was mourning and had been for weeks. The flash of reality came in one of those beloved shower ‘aha’ moments, the kind that sweeps the fog away and brings instant clarity. I was feeling a loss. All the emotions were there — sorrow, grief, anger, sadness — but no one I knew had died recently. Why was I grieving like someone had?
Deconstructing loss
Mourning is most commonly associated with loss due to death but mourning the living can be just as significant an experience. The problem is that as a society I do not think we value loss of the living in the same way as we do loss from death. With death, the palpable sadness is expected, understood and validated and the mourning period is gracious and forgiving. But when someone is mourning a living loss, like that of a relationship, that period is typically far more restrictive and less emotionally generous.
This value imbalance can be terribly debilitating for people. It can put a limit on how deeply we allow ourselves to feel our emotions or how much time we afford ourselves to move forward. We may feel pressure to truncate a living loss in a way we wouldn’t for loss from death. This truncating is what I think can be the most problematic. If we do not allow ourselves (or others) to mourn all loss wholly and unconditionally then how can we expect to arrive at acceptance?
There is no formula
When we experience loss from something other than death, I feel like there is this expectation and or demand that we rapidly conquer the stages of grief and maybe even skip over a few to readily accept it and move on. I think this is particularly true with the loss experienced by the dissolution of a romantic relationship.
When a romantic relationship ends, supporters can give us hugs and sad sympathetic frowns while simultaneously engaging in a raucous chorus of “you’re better off without them”, “they don’t deserve you” and “you can do soooo much better”. These throw ’em to the curb type of statements can be helpful to buoy someone in the moment or briefly lift their head in a smile, but long term they do not do much to accelerate the healing process. Instead they support the idea that this type of loss engenders a time-limited mourning period. While well meaning, these oft used rallying cries can minimize the pain and grief that someone may need to travel through to unconditionally accept their very real loss. It reminds me of the Sex in the City episode where a formula for recovering from a failed relationship was presented: the time allotted to mourn was correlated directly with the length of time the relationship had been intact. At the end of the contrived period of time, the person would be expected to be fully healed and ready to move on.
Contrast this scenario with that of the loss of a relationship due to death. Could you ever imagine someone trying to soothe and support you with those same rallying cries? Or telling you that you had been sad long enough? Why then do we think about and react to these two situations of loss so differently? Why do we push hard for someone to get to the state of acceptance with the loss of the living, but give time and space to fully mourn the loss of the dead?
The emotions that are entangled in the loss of a significant person, whether due to death or separation or even profound disappointment are ultimately the same. We mourn what we no longer have. We mourn what we may have never had. But perhaps most of all, we mourn what could have been.
Letting go of expectations
Parenthood can present another opportunity where mourning loss can be a painful necessity to arrive at a healthier place of acceptance with children. A parent-child relationship can be overflowing with joy and ripe with disappointment. Sometimes parents have to accept that the child they thought they would have, is not the child that is in front of them. This acceptance does not happen overnight. It is a painful sometimes gut-wrenching process that cannot even start until the tornado of dust from churned up emotions is calmed. However, that calmness and settling can help a parent to see that sometimes they have to mourn the child they had expected in order to embrace, value and accept the child they have.
Like with the parent-to-child scenario, other non-romantic relationships can be difficult to mourn because they are chock-full of expectations. Even if we are not holding on to a perfect ideal, we swim in expectations. Happiness can sometimes be achieved by working to lower or eliminate them completely. It is not a magic bullet — letting go of expectations does not always bring happiness and acceptance and the process to get there is not simple or without struggle and setbacks. But taking the time to identify expectations and travel through the process of mourning what we don’t have can help bring us to the horizon of accepting what we do.
Seeing leaves
My shower-induced revelation the other day had to do with a non-romantic relationship I have long struggled with wanting to be different and have tried unsuccessfully to remake into the image in my mind’s eye. I have tried so many strategies for making it better from creating emotional daylight to dabbling in more than my share of unbridled anger. But I have not been able to find that sweet spot that would satisfy me enough to stop wanting it to be better.
A decade or more ago I decided that all I had to do to stop the cycle of disappointment was to simply accept the relationship the way it was. It was either that or no longer have this person in my life and that was a non-starter. So, I flipped a switch and told myself that it was what it was. Looking back, I can see why this has not worked. Although it did make our interactions better it has left me feeling emotionally numb and distant. My attempt to manufacture acceptance had actually prevented me seeing the leaves from the tree — that while I had acknowledged what it was not, I had never fully mourned what it would never be.
Can you unpack that?
Most of us have a fair bit of baggage that we have accumulated throughout our decades. How we choose to unpack it can mean the difference between resentment and forgiveness. We have to allow ourselves to fully mourn events and people and disappointments at our own pace and in our own way. We have to be free to feel all the feels so the sun can rise on acceptance.
It is in the dawn of this acceptance where we will be able to see the beauty that was always there.
