Accepting Loss

Thursday, September 11, 2014

How do you come to an acceptance of something lost to you forever?  I do not mean this to be a rhetorical question. 

The question of how a person can come to a healthy acceptance of loss has been on my mind essentially every day since I plunged back into the world of conscious personal growth work some fifteen months ago.  Loss is an inevitable feature of our lives.  It may seem exceedingly morbid to deliberately hold such an awareness in your conscious mind but it is indeed true that everything you have in your life will one day no longer be ‘yours’.  In other words, fame, wealth, professional success, love and health are all perishable goods.  At the end of our lives it seems to me the question most relevant to ask ourselves will be this: “What have we done with the gifts we enjoyed in our lives while we had them?”

I couldn’t escape the truth of my own mortality last year when my entire life seemed to implode before my very eyes.  Over a year later I am finally beginning to decisively overcome the swirling chaos of that time and , equally important, feel in my very bones that I am.  Over a year later I feel like I am finally really and truly adjusting to the changes that have occurred in the last year.  And I’m finally beginning to really feel fairly comfortable with what it feels like to no longer be unconsciously dissociating as I did so much when I was a kid (and a younger adult).  And yet there remains the grief.

Wading through my grief is a fundamental part and parcel of my work each week when I visit with my therapist.  I don’t suspect there are too many people who, like myself, have experienced profound awakenings which have been made possible (in part) by the application of a form of treatment that was previously a complete unknown to them.  The journey of awakening can be a tremendously lonely experience.  But it doesn’t have to be a lonely experience.  It’s important to me that I remind myself of this because unremitting loneliness was too often my ironic companion when I was a child.  Time and time again I have come back to the reality that feeling lonely was too often a burden of my earliest years of life.  Instability, mental illness and domestic violence are not the types of companions that a little boy should have.  Little boys need other little boys to be friends!

I am especially aware of the omnipresence of my grief this week as I near another birthday.  I marvel at how much I have accomplished in the last (mere) twelve months.  And sometimes I also sigh when I contemplate how much more work may still be before me.  But then, on the good days, I remind myself of the beauty and good things of the present moment.  I try as much as I can to bring my awareness back to the present moment and focus consciously on what is good and beautiful in my life.  Being radically present to the life I am living NOW is something I have needed to learn better how to do.  I think it is something many people living ensconced in Western culture would benefit from doing more often.

I suppose it’s also fitting I reference the deep (and common) experience of grief today as it is the anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001.  Throughout this day I plan to avoid mass media as much as possible.  While it is often important to grieve in communal ways I find it difficult to listen to many of the portrayals of that day as repeated by the mainstream media here in the United States.  It has long been my opinion that our nation genuinely squandered an amazing opportunity to develop a more just, equitable foreign policy in the days, weeks, months and years after what happened on a sunny September morning now thirteen years in the past.  While the loss of life in New York City and Washington, DC was truly grotesque and an affront to human dignity the horrible foreign policy choice of one George W. Bush unleashed a tide of destruction and misery that still dwarfs what happened on that one September day.  Thirteen years later our current President is still dealing with the unsavory consequences of the poorly conceived invasion of Iraq.  Whether you support our current President or despise him, and regardless of how you felt about Bush, I think most Americans can collectively agree that what has unfolded in the Middle East in general and in Iraq in particular exemplifies the very meaning of tragedy.

For one person thirteen years is a long time to suffer the consequences of a single poorly conceived choice…regardless of whether it was a choice of your own or the choice of another individual.  My grief sometimes morphs back into something more reminiscent of anger when I find myself pondering too long how choices my father made decades ago were still affecting me, in an adverse way, as recently as the last few years of my own life.

Grief has a heavy quality about it.  Grief is a human experience ultimately experienced by all who will live out ‘the mortal coil’.  In astrology the planet Saturn rules over the realm of grief.  In alchemy grief is akin to the (very) heavy metal lead.  When we are consumed with grief we often will feel positively weighed down with it.  To free yourself from grief, both fresh grief as well as ancient grief, requires conscious attention.  But it also requires space.  And so I will end my writing today as I began it…with a question.  It is a question I ask myself often.  Am I making space in my life for my own grief?