THE CHAPTERS: life lessons

chapter 4

ଘ(੭ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ

loss

We eventually lose everything we have, yet what ultimately matters can never be lost. Our houses, cars, jobs, and my money, our youth and even our loved ones, are just on loan to us. Like everything else our loved ones are not our to keep. But realizing this truth does not have to sadden us. To the contrary, it can give us a greater appreciation for many wonderful experiences and things we have during our time here.

In many ways, if life is a school, loss is a major part of the curriculum. As we experience loss, we also experience those we love and sometimes even strangers caring for us in our time of need. Loss is a hole in our heart. But it is a hole that calls forth love and can hold love from others.

We enter the world suffering from the loss of our mother's womb, the perfect world that created us. We are thrust into a place where we're not always fed when we are hungry? Where we don't know if mom come back to the crib. We enjoy being held, and then we're suddenly our down. As we get older, we lose our friends when we or they move away, we lose our toys when they break or get lost, and we lose the softball championship. We have our first love only to lose them and series of losses has just begun. In the years that follow we lose teachers, friends, and our childhood dreams.

All the intangibles such as our dreams, youth, and independence will ultimately fade or ends all of our belongings are just on loan to us. Were they ever really ours? Our reality here is not permanent( neither is our ownership of anything. Everything is temporary. Trying to find permanence is impossible, and we ultimately learn that there is no safety in trying to keep everything. And there is no safety in trying to prevent loss.

We don't like to see life this way. We like to pretend that we will always have life and the things within it. And we don't want to look at the ultimate perceived loss, death itself. It is amazing to see the pretenses many families of the terminally ill carry on at the end of life. They don't want to talk about the losses they are going through, and they certainly don't want to mention it to their dying loved ones.

The hospital personnel don't want to say anything to their patients either. How shortsighted of us to think that these people approaching the end of their lives are not aware of the situation and how foolish of us to think hey this actually helps them. More than one terminally ill patient has looked at his or her family and said sternly, "don't try to hide from me that I'm dying. How can you not say it? Don't you realize that every living thing reminds me that I'm dying?"

The dying know what they are losing and understand it's value. It's the living who often kid themselves.

Most of us fight and resist loss throughout our lives, not understanding that life is loss and loss is life; life cannot change and we cannot grow without loss. There an old Jewish saying that if you dance at a lot of weddings, you'll cry at a lot of funerals. This means if you're present at many beginnings, you'll also be there for many endings. If you have many friends, you'll experience your share of losses.

If you feel that you're suffering great loss, it's only because you have been so richly blessed by life. The losses we experience in life are both big and small, everything from the death of a parent to misplacing a phone number. Life's losses may be permanent, such as death, or temporary as when you miss your children in a business trip. The five stages which describe the way we respond to all losses not just death can be applied to our losses in life whether big or small, permanent or temporary. Your respond is these stages; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

Not everyone goes through these five stages with every loss, the responses don't always occur in the same order, and you may visit rages more than once. However, we do experience loss many times in many ways and we react to our losses. With loss comes experience of its terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life.