Significant loss takes us on a journey of no return to what was!
What we had is gone, and what is left is something we can only learn to accept. And it feels impossible to adjust to.
Pain hammers the stake of reality in a bleeding heart that cannot adapt, but is challenged to. That’s grief.
Whether it was a loved one we lost, a career that was curtailed, the end of a marriage, finding ourselves in abuse and confronting it, a prodigal child who hasn’t yet returned, or any form of untenable life, what it comes down to is loss. And “closure” is, I feel, something of a myth. I think closure is more akin to denial; it’s a lie we’re tempted to tell ourselves in our grief, because the world is telling us to move on, and let’s face it, the pain is far too real to ever be palatable.
This article is about something better than closure.
When I lost my first marriage, I felt I’d lost everything overnight. Wife, easy access to my children (who I missed terribly), home, and even my job had to change. Within three months I’d made massive adjustments to make my life, and my daughters’ lives, more livable for the future.
Losing my first marriage is still something that I regret for the lasting impact on the family I love. And yet that regret leaves me motivated always now to be better. In our comfortable western lives, we grow accustomed to resisting pain, but pain, however unbearable it is, makes us stand up to attention.
Not one day in the first three months (nor most of the days for the first eighteen months) did I not feel the dread of hell. Pain was just something I was unable to escape from. Yet, in the worst season of my life, somehow, I had impetus to be brought to my knees and to begin to live the life I always promised myself I would live—and finally achieve it!
17 years on and I still can’t quite explain how it feels right to say that the worst thing that happened to me became the best thing. But I’ve learned that accepting mysteries is a central to maturing.
When we were losing Nathanael and then finally lost him, even as it was for us in the most unpredictable situation, we never felt we had a grasp on the elusiveness of our grief. Like losing my first marriage changed me permanently, losing our son ended one part of our lives that has never returned.
So much change around that time of our lives also blurred our ability to feel safe. So many times, and in so many situations we’ve had to tell ourselves to grasp the present and hold onto hope for the future, rather than lament the past we wish never died.
Grief in many ways casts us away from the familiar. We feel like foreigners in our own lives. And yet, there is actually a blessing in this experience, as well as a blessing in being held in a state of pain.
Grief has so often caused me to think, “this will never change” or “How long, O Lord?” as per Psalm 13. But I always somehow held onto the hope that I could only learn if things DIDN’T change, if I was held in that time to endure. This hope helped me to endure when I would gladly have said goodbye.
Loss does change our lives permanently, and for a time we feel like strangers in our own lives, but hope can be gleaned in the idea that somehow it will be worth it in the end.
Venture through grief by steadfast faith, because that hope emerges in the reality of hope.
Loss changes us permanently, but grief in and of itself forces us to adjust and finally accept that a life of faith is the only way to survive. And by it, eventually too, do we thrive.
Despite the change we despise in loss, it is not the death of hope. Quite the contrary, it is hope brought alive through a faith that can live no other way.
If there is one permanent change to embrace it is to find ourselves steadfast of faith.
Loss holds open to us this opportunity.
Photo by Greg Ortega on Unsplash
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