COPING WITH LOSS

Fr Jim Cogley

It is difficult when experiencing the excruciating pain of loss to see it as an invitation to wholeness. This happens at several levels. First from an early age a couple may have been very co-dependent and lived life through each other to the point that the identity of each was in the other. When one is taken, for the other it is like Siamese twins being separated without anesthetic and can be quite life threatening. However, for the ones who do, they begin to live their own life for the first time and even begin to enjoy being their own person; the one they never allowed themselves to be before. Secondly a significant loss will never happen in isolation to earlier losses and any of these that lay dormant but never integrated will inevitably rise into sharper consciousness. As part of the grief journey these unresolved losses will seek resolution. Lastly some of these losses may not be in relation to death but to unmet needs from childhood and during grief these too may scream for attention.

Letting go is a term that is often used in relation to grief work. However, it is unfortunate that the term carries connotations of farewells and goodbyes when this is not truly the case. We never say goodbye to anyone, but we do need to let go of how we once knew them, in order to get used to knowing them in a different way. Two birds will fly together, and weave in and out in perfect harmony, only because e they are free of each other. However, tie them together and while they have four wings they will not be able to fly. This is a basic truth that is fundamental to resolving grief. Unless we release, we cannot have and in not doing so we condemn ourselves to a life of loneliness and emptiness. To love something is to set them free and if they come back to us in a new way only then are they ours forever. Letting go is essential to resolving grief. While it is a farewell to what was, it is an opening of the heart to what is.

If we hold on to someone too tightly in life we call it control, and it has the effect of pushing them away from us. Jealousy is an expression of this, and it has been described as a monster that devours the object of its desire under the pretext of keeping it alive. For some reason when someone close to us dies we fail to see that our holding on, beyond an appropriate mourning period, is also a form of control. One man was shocked to realize that the holding on he thought was an expression of love for his wife was inadvertently a form of control. What holding on does to us is that it keeps us locked in the past. It makes our lives a misery in the present and it robs us of hope for the future. The greatest expression of our love for a loved one who has died is not by holding on out of morbid grief, but by releasing and letting them go.

When a person dies old and full of years, we mourn the life that was and have gratitude in our hearts for that life that was fully lived. However, with the death of a child, it’s so much different. Here we have to mourn the life that never can be. The death of a child runs contrary to nature because every parent expects to die before their offspring. Only couples that have experienced such a tragedy know the strain that such a loss can place on their relationship. A couple are likely to grieve in such different ways that it drives a wedge between them. As a consequence, a large percentage go their separate ways. One example was where after the death of their child the mother went overboard on religion, but not in a healthy way. Meanwhile her partner turned to alcohol. Both were trying to numb their pain but through different types of addictive behaviors. Each was desperately searching for a connection in spirit with their child but were looking in the wrong place.