Jewels from the Dark

I recently wrote a paper on grief and the idea of “living loss,” where the loss is not in a physical death of a person, but of a persistent, permanent loss of something or someone important.¹ This type of grief can crush a person. Of this, I know full well.

The last two months have been the most emotionally devastating of my life. I have had many experiences with end-of-relationship grief where what I mourned was what should or could have been. This recent ending has brought mourning for what actually was. The pain in that loss has been exquisite.

At this particular moment in my processing of ever-present grief, I believe whoever started the old adage “better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all” was fully and completely wrong. I have never seen any truth in that phrase and I still do not. Can I look back fondly at what I had? Yes. Can I appreciate what I had? Yes. But is this level of anguish and shattering heartbreak “better” than just being alone and never having had a taste of how amazing that relationship was? Not even a little bit.

I have spent significant amounts of time and emotional energy in the last two months to learn, yet again, how to carry what I can’t put down. For that is what living loss is…it is an experience, a thing, that you are handed in life that you can never put down – at least not fully. So it becomes a matter of embracing the heft and the weight and the awkwardness of how that grief of living loss decides to pop up over time. I refuse to let this opportunity become one more area of my life where I try to strong arm the ocean. I refuse to resist the resistance anymore.

So I will open my heart and my arms (and the floodgates of my tears…) and I will start to repack the pieces of the ruins of my life. Taking the things that life has given me over the last 5 years, I will learn how to accept and carry what I can’t put down. For with it, I will have the material to create new things…redeemed things…living things that were lost and then found and then made into something new.

I will mourn and grieve well. And I will be ok.

1. For more information on living loss, see Den Elzen, K., Breen, L. J., & Neimeyer, R. A. (2023). Rewriting grief following bereavement and non-death loss: A pilot writing-for-wellbeing study. British Journal of Guidance & Counseling, 51(3), 425-443. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2022.2160967 and Wolfelt, A. D. (2014). Reframing PTSD as traumatic grief: How caregivers can companion traumatized grievers through catch-up mourning. Companion Press. ↩︎