Loss
“A time to get, and a time to lose.” Ecclesiastes 3:6
If nothing else, loss forces us to recognize that we are not the individuals we seem to be, but transient swellings in the interconnected network of everything.
Loss knows no season, but it is in the final chapters of our lives that we become most convincingly acquainted with it. We reserve a particular horror for loss that strikes us as unnatural: young children losing parents, parents losing children at any age, young people just starting out, children, period—and to be touched by any of these is to be wounded for life. Loss toward the end of life, where it belongs, is different; the great theme of existence asserts itself. It is in the contract from the beginning: we will build up, and in time we will lose it all.
In case you’re forgetful, loss helps you remember that.
In my own season of loss, I know perfectly well my experience is not exceptional, but typical. In the last ten years: Mama, other beloved family members, four of my closest friends. Not to mention less close friends, parents of friends, acquaintances, public figures of the Zeitgeist—too many to name. But are we really in a world without Gregg Allman, David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Pat Sullivan, Robin Williams, Stephen Hawking, Arnold Palmer? If we lose another Beatle, I’m in trouble.
But the fact is, we accept loss, and adjust to it, because it is inevitable. And here towards the end, I find myself thinking about it every day.
Obviously, loss of someone or something you love is loss of yourself. Because that part of yourself you gave to what you loved, you can’t get back. Nor would you want to. The love itself doesn’t die, nor does the person who, just as he or she primarily did even while living, lives within you. What you’ve lost is not the person, but the space the person occupied.
You’ve got one less place to go.
I’ve had seasons in my life when I had so many places to go I’ve thought, “I just need some time to myself!” At my time in life now, I know better than to wish for such things.
In every group, every family, every generation there has to be someone who is the last one standing, even if they’re not doing a lot of standing. Remember Eben Flood in “Mr. Flood’s Party,” or the thrilling poetry of the Last Survivor in Beowulf? Or my grandmother, who outlived my grandfather by seven years—and with him lost her home, all her friends, and the world she knew and understood. She slowly went out of focus during those seven years, and no conversation concerning contemporary events could hope to last longer than thirty seconds with her, before she was back in the Birmingham of her girlhood.
When something dies, it’s not that an empty space is left where it once was, but that the space itself existed only to accommodate the thing, and dies with it. Where the space was becomes featureless and empty, and in time can no longer maintain the charade of being a space at all. You see the procession of having lost this, then this, then this, and your own reality begins to lose resolution. You think of what you still have—what happens if I lose this, and this? What if you do end up being the last one?
Reality would desert you, and you would find yourself on an island in a sea of nothingness.
The worst thing about loss is the way it drives you deeper into yourself.
And I don’t know about you, but going deeper into myself is something I would rather choose to do than be forced to.
But for all loss takes, does it give anything?
Well, like a man who knows he will be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.
I love spring, and spring is coming. I think of all the springs stretching back through my past, and now I suddenly find myself thinking, what if this were the last spring I ever see? Not as a mental exercise, but as a reality. The effect would be like seeing it all for the first time. Really seeing it.
If you have your own work you love, loss allows you to devote more time to it and lets you experience the deeply gratifying process of learning more about it and getting better at it.
You can try to make yourself a better—more enlightened—person—
Find some deeper truth—
Find peace—
If such things are even possible in a vacuum.
Some losses shake our foundations, sending us like engineers to inspect the base of the dam for cracks, trying to determine if we can still be our old selves.
We can’t. The bell definitely tolls for us.
Over a million people in the world take their own lives every year, something like 47,000 in the U.S. That’s about 130 a day.
I judge none, my heart is with all.
Everybody who knew PK loved him.
March 5, 2020