The Loss Of What Could Be
I’ve been slowly making my way through a book on grief. It is written by J.S. Park and it’s called “As Long As You Need.” This man writes with haunting honesty on the topic of grief from the perspective of a hospital chaplain. The pages of this beautiful book have been left tear-soaked as Park has given permission not to rush past the losses that we will inevitably face. In the opening chapter, he talks about grieving the loss of the future—the loss of what could be. I’ll share with you this excerpt.
“The lie of Letting Go is powered by a simple and harmful myth: that when we hold our losses closely, somehow we do ourselves more harm. And if you suffer an “invisible loss”—the death of a dream, the loss of a future, the collapse of something that hasn’t happened to yet—this gets even less dignity than the deceased does. If the loss of a whole person is already so suppressed, then the loss of a dream never stood a chance.
I’ve seen how harmful it gets when we try to move on so quickly. There is a sprinting to closure, not just with platitudes and bad theology, but by the urgent demand to get you back to top shape, to work mode, to the hustle and the grind, to happy smiles—all the quell everyone else’s own sense of inconvenience.”
What Park is talking about here, as he writes, is intrapsychic grief, as he defines it, the pain of losing what will never be, the reaching for something that was supposed to happen.
The pain of losing what will never be. Sit with those words for a minute—and I mean that literally.
If you have a beating heart, you have lost something, and all loss hurts. I have often been struck by how quickly we move on, even in death. In Judaism, they have a practice called sitting shiva, which is a period of seven days set aside after the funeral to forgo their usual routines and set aside time to grieve their loss. It is typically held in their home, open for people to come in and provide comfort. It is a beautiful practice. But as much as it is beautiful to allow breathing room for grief, surely the pain of the loss of a loved one doesn’t resolve in seven days. We know this. Nonetheless, the world must go on, this much I know. We move on with memories of the past and gaping holes of what could have been in our future. We move on carrying all kinds of losses, visible and invisible, primary and secondary. We move one, I guess, because we have no other choice.
Or do we?
I’m about half way through this book right now, and what Park is getting at is that we don’t have great framework for how to grieve. Moreso, our theology of suffering is lackluster, at best. This isn’t so much a harsh criticism as it is just to point out what is true. Suffering existing as a fact, as part of life, is easy to acknowledge. But when suffering becomes a verb, attaching itself to part of our story, we tend to do all we can to make it go away as quickly as possible. Pain hurts, so we try to kill it. We attempt to numb it—or to forget about it altogether. Or we go the other way. We slap on coats of paint to cover it up that look like cliche statements that will never hold up in court. Or we stick it in a compartment—or rather maybe a safe—lock it up, and throw away the key. We move on to the next thing, thinking that the more good we can stack on top of the bad, the better it will be. None of it works. The only thing that works is to allow it to have its rightful place.
Park makes it clear in his book that he has put himself on the front lines of stories that mostly don’t end well. He minces no words on the fact that there is no easy way through loss, there is no way to explain the terrible things that happen, and there is no quick comfort cure. He said that even the most well-meaning among us would rather look away, run away, and find a way to make it disappear. Well-meaning, maybe, realistic…I’m afraid not.
The Power Of Shared Loss
I had a birthday last week, and I shared dinner with a few close friends a few days prior. A couple of them have a history of sharing birthdays like this with me. It was quiet and intimate, around a table with good food and good company. These are just a few of my favorite things. For the past six months, this particular set of friends has been there for me as I have lived out and processed through this season of life. It has been messy and heavy. I have shared real-time wins and losses. Some losses big enough that many people would run. But these people have not run. They have stayed. They have dug in. They have brought me in closer and held me up. They have helped me. And when they couldn’t help me, they pointed me to places that could. But most of all, they have stayed. They have bore witness to my loss; they have allowed room for it all to breathe—they have grieved alongside me what was and what could have been. They have allowed me to bring out my whole self, messy and inarticulate, full of questions, sadness, and anger. They have taken the pieces of my what could have been and held when it has been too heavy for me to carry alone.
That particular night, we sat down at the table, and my only request was to hear from them. I am the kind of friend who loves to listen. I can hold space for the hardest of things. Friendship, to me, is to suffer with and to rejoice with and everything in between. Around the table that night, we talked about life. By the time you reach midlife, false pretenses begin to fall away alongside your skin losing some elasticity. By now, we have gained and lost—we have lost people, jobs, and relationships—we have all lost dreams of what could be. We have tried and failed. We have had to look at ourselves in the mirror and see the sum total of all of it. One friend is newly married, one a single mom by choice, one divorced, and the other has been through her fair share of hard having two kids with special needs and having suffered from severe panic attacks for a good portion of her life. So many losses of what could be.
For a few hours, they took turns sharing around a framework of these four questions. What is right? What is wrong? What is missing? What is confused? We listened, asked clarifying questions, and offered encouragement. We have history to know the battle scars each of us has arrived with. These scars, some still open wounds, are signs of life on this side of heaven—signs of loss, heartbreak, and things that we may forever grieve. Some scars have healed as much as they can—these tell the stories of how we have become who we are. This is partly why there is power in sticking it out. We don’t do this because we are guaranteed to come out the other side—sometimes, things happen that will never get a big red bow. We do this because when you find people who understand that life involves suffering and that it is far better to suffer with than to suffer alone, choosing to stay is perhaps the bravest and most compassionate thing we can do. Compassion is a word that comes from the Latin root “passio”, which means to suffer, paired with the Latin prefix “com”, meaning together – to suffer together.
At the end of the night, I asked if I could answer just one of the questions. I have been talking for a while now about the other three. It’s easy to define what is wrong right now. A lot is missing, and I live many of my waking hours in confusion. But I wanted to tell these friends what is right in my life right now. I told them that it was them. My community is right. It’s so right that I can only conclude that it is one way that God has prepared a way in advance for me to get through this time in my life. Try as you might; there is no way around the pain of losing what could be. There’s no timeline for grief, and there is no route to take to short-circuit its work. It is now a verb, and it is traveling with you down all the new roads you are paving. The truth is, none of us know how our stories will end or what will happen along the way. But from where I sit, when people choose to surround you in these moments, the way through somehow becomes easier to bear, and for right now, that’s enough.
Beautifully written
This was exactly what I needed to read today. Thank you, Julie, for sharing your hard-won wisdom.