“We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.” ~ C. S. Lewis
Loss. We’ve all suffered it in some way. Whether it be the loss of a family member, or a childhood friendship due to distance, or even a $100 bet with your sister that the Patriots would win the superbowl. It comes in varying degrees of intensity, and even after you’ve felt its nasty sting, it feels impossible to seemingly compare apples to oranges. After all, how do you compare the loss of $100 and your pride to Grandma? You just can’t. But it doesn’t mean both situations aren’t upsetting.
I guess I’m learning that to live, we all live in degrees.
Since the sudden loss of my father, I’ve frequently had a thought that goes something like this….
“My life was so perfect and blessed, and then this happened. It’s as if life saw me living with ease, pleasure, and luck, and said, ‘time for a reality check’. I feel like everything up until this moment has been an uplifting novel, and now here is the twist that I should have been expecting, but wasn’t.”
I say we all live in degrees because I think perspective is what can make very different losses hurt the same. We all feel that amount of “not normal” for a period of time, during which we compare our feelings and personal states to times past. “How many degrees away from my ‘normal’ am I right now?”.
In the past four months, I’ve faced the comment “I know how you feel” about a dozen times. Two times I heard it, I was actually glad to. Two people in my life have been through what I’ve gone through- both have lost their father in their late teens or early twenties. The other ten times, I felt a blow to my stomach and my anger rise as I internally rebutted, how could you possibly know what this feels like? Because at the time, I felt that comparing the loss of my dad to someone’s father passing at age 80 was crass and unfair…comparing apples to oranges. After all, your father got to walk you down the aisle, and meet your children, and retire… I’m not only losing the man he was, but the man he was supposed to be in my life for years to come.
This idea is so important, I’m going to say it again- when we experience loss, we aren’t only feeling the loss of that person, but loss of that person’s place in our life’s future. Their interactions and roles, their support and advice. And while this ‘future’ can vary in length, the pain that comes with loss, at any age, is by degrees. Because while I’m mourning more of a future I’ll never have with my father, someone losing their dad at 80 has many more years of memories to analyze, advice to miss, and experiences that will feel different from their past ‘normal’. There is no real ‘fair’ comparison of these two situations, except for the comparison of our emotions in grief, and the degree to which we feel our lives have changed as a result of loss.
Going back to the quote at the top of this blog…
“We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.” ~ C. S. Lewis
I think this idea is something that I grasped quickly, but I think many do not. When my sister apologised for having to tell me over the phone of my Dad’s passing, and my brother sympathized that I was grieving thousands of miles away from my family, I simply replied “don’t be sorry-life is unpredictable”. Somehow I was able to sit in the shock of the event and calmly understand that my situation is not unique nor temporary. That this event, while unpredictable, would be part of my life forever and would shape who I become.
Whatever your loss-past, present, or future- I hope you’ll learn and grow from it, as I am trying to. I write this post not to claim some grand grief “wisdom” or to convince anyone to suppress their grief or trauma for the sake of self-proclaimed progress. I write this post simply to record my thoughts as they are, in hopes that if someone feels the same, or vastly different, we might learn from knowing each other’s experiences.
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Personal advice/ side-notes: (from someone who is not licensed as a counselor, or anything for that matter)
Please use the phrase “I know how you feel” with great consideration, or not at all. Consider first what the individual needs to hear, rather than what you feel like saying.
Listen first, and tell your life story later. Premature empathy, to me, sometimes felt like that person was using my tragedy as a podium to express how still deeply traumatized they are by their past grief. Which, at any time, felt neither relevant to my grief, nor reassuring to see in someone who is supposedly further along in their grief process.
Those who helped me the most in personal interactions were those who demonstrated strength and resiliency through their loss, and who offered their tactics for living with grief or their time without persuasion or expectations. For those of you who demonstrated this to me, I thank you.
Lastly, tell the people you love in your life how much they mean to you, and express gratitude frequently. Life is unpredictable.
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