Living With Loss

February 2, 2003

". . .Inevitably our anguish frames the question "Why?" if not on our lips, in our hearts. There is no answer that removes this question--no answer that can bridge the chasm of irreparable separation. Life will never be the same, and this is as it should be, for our loved ones are not expendable."

-Paul N. Carnes

In recent weeks many of you have lost family members, including parents and siblings, to old age and accidental death. In our larger community, we have experienced the senseless death of a talented teenager in an alcohol related accident, and the suicide death of another very promising young man. All such losses are cumulative; they take their toll on the emotions of those of us who are left behind. As the quotation on your orders of service suggests, the anguish of these losses causes us to frame the inevitable question, "Why?" for which there is no completely satisfying answer.

How do we go on living when death and grief have intimately touched our lives? At the funeral service for Jeremy Dorfmann, the young man from town who took his own life, a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay was read which summed up, I believe, the feelings of everyone present. I also read the poem ["Dirge Without Music] at the service for my friend's wife last week:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the cold ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,--but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,--
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

A poet [Wendell Berry] has written that "We are what we have lost." If it is true, then to forget our losses would be to forget who we are. It would be to lose our selves. We know from observing those who suffer various forms of senility how horrible the loss of self can be.

Loss is a challenging fact of life. A former colleague [Richard Fewkes] has written that, "We grieve for different reasons":

We grieve the loss of a loved one in death. We grieve the loss of a marriage in divorce. We grieve the loss of financial integrity and security when we lose a job. We grieve the loss of friends and familiar surroundings when we move to a different location. . . . We grieve the loss of a sense of life purpose and identity when we retire. . . . We grieve the loss of daily bonds of friendship and comaradarie when we graduate and go on to college or a job. We grieve the loss of our vitality and energy with the aches and pains of aging, failing eyesight, loss of hearing, lack of mobility. We grieve the prospect of our own impending death and loss of our very selves.

Rollo May once wrote,

We may look at an autumn tree so beautiful in its brilliant colors that we feel like weeping; or we may hear music so lovely that we are overcome with sadness. The craven thought then creeps into our conscious- ness that maybe it would have been better not to have heard the music. Then we wouldn't be faced with this uncomfortable paradox--knowing that time will come and take our love away, that everything we love will die. But the essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and earth will ultimately claim us all.

Living with loss means that we have to reconstitute ourselves each time a new loss is suffered. As my colleage Forrest Church has written, ". . .Recovering from a loved one's death has a lot to do with recovering the meaning of our own lives. Not only their intrinsic meaning when measured against the abyss and the possibility of extinction, but also their meaning in relationship to family and loved ones and friends."

The worst thing we can do for our grief is to shut ourselves off from others. Our grief must be shared. A terrible loss can actually be an opportunity to reappraise our lives, to see more clearly what is most precious in them, and to recommit ourselves to those others who still remain with us, in whose lives we can still make a difference. Our losses can be an opportunity to open ourselves up and to extend our love more widely than before, perhaps to reconnect with old friends or even to repair fractured relationships. Loss is perhaps most importantly a window of opporunity to learn the meaning of empathy; for as Helen Keller once said, when we lose someone we enter the greatest company in the world: the company of those who known grief.

We may not be able to totally overcome our grief, but I truly believe that out of our grief we can learn to sing a song of gladness for all the gifts of life. Richard Gilbert, recently retired minister of the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, New York, has written,

I refuse to despair of death. The very fact of death greatly concentrates my soul. We live in its mystery; we work in the dark; we do what we can; we give what we have; we live as we are able. If we cannot solve the riddle, and I wager we cannot, we learn to live with it and enjoy it. So we prepare for death by living a life.

All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people is grass. [Isaiah]

From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Unitarian Universalist minister and author Tom Owen-Towle has written of sorrow in reponse to a little poem by Carol Hudson:

Bitterly I cried
That sorrow has no answers.
Calmly he replied
that sorrow is an answer in itself.
Suddenly, I understood--briefly.

Each phrase [writes Tom] is truthful. Some sorrows deliver no answers--only an open heart and a blank mind. Nothing else. At other times sorrow itself is the answer. By facing it directly, by dwelling amid the anguish, we receive a response of help. Finally, our understanding may be only brief. We hanker for final, full answers from our sorrows. Rarely do we get such.

Your pain is a measure of your love. As such, it is beautiful. However much it hurts, treasure it. Your pain is another aspect of the sacrament of death, reminding you that by caring so deeply you've dared to risk your heart for another, an won, despite the pain of loss, their love.

May you learn to live with your losses and to carry your grief proudly, in the knowledge that you have risked all for love, and won, so that you can say, with St. Paul,

Death has been swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?