Loss changes you.
It flat out changes the person that you’ve grown up to be.
Just stop and think of every little, tiny thing that you can right now …that you’ve lost at one point in life.
Your keys.
Your purse.
Your phone.
Your job.
Your friend.
Your girlfriend.
Your boyfriend.
Your car in the airport parking lot.
Your damn beagles.
However minor or meaningless the loss was, and/or however short the timeframe of losing it was, I bet it still changed you.
I can hear myself now:
“Lindsey, you have to always put your keys in the bowl by the door so you aren’t looking for them.”
Or
“Lindsey, you have to write the parking spot down in your phone before you leave your car at the airport.”
Or
“Lindsey, you have to double-check the lock is secure on the beagle cage every single night.”
My point—the smallest of losses still cause us to pause and change our behavior. Surprisingly, despite being that type of trivial loss, it still causes us anxiety, irritation, and usually a delay in getting somewhere on time. So we make a promise to ourselves to avoid that in the future.
And sometimes we keep that promise.
Sometimes we don’t… and history repeats itself.
But regardless, we survive those little losses.
And then life introduces you to your reserve strength. Life says—let me help this poor soul realize how much their faith can be waivering one day from lack of focus & attention, and then it can be their only North Star, the next.
Life presents to you… real loss.
Real loss in almost every definition in my book involves a human.
It’s hard to say what is the worst human to lose. I think it depends on your own circumstances, and your own relationships.
But losing an important human in your life can be the biggest heartache, and truly the biggest soul hurt you ever experience.
Now as someone who has only lost older family members, a few friends/co-workers, and no immediate member of my family, my perspective will be different than others, I’m sure.
But here is what I know about grief:
You have to survive 2 main phases: hard-core grief & then life afterwards.
The hard-core grief is the most intense & the scariest. I felt like I lost 2-3 months in a thick fog of the deepest part of this grief, and then slowly drifted back to the surface of life by about a year after the loss. Those 2-3 months… I honestly can barely remember. I felt like friends and family gently nudged me to keep putting one foot in front of the other, but also reminded me that this wasn’t a time to try and jog. Walk it out. Breathe and walk—my main 2 goals during the hard core grief period.
But honestly, that whole first year was filled with random bouts of crying, guilt, fear, family-stress. I could be in the cereal aisle, and I’d see a brand that reminded me of him and I’d just start sobbing. It would make no sense, it wasn’t logical. It made my husband nervous to speak to me:) But honestly, it was a phase I had to fully experience in order to survive.
I guess the main pieces of advice I could give from my perspective for the hard-core grief phase would be:
1. Intentionally focus on & capture happy loving moments with your family.
2. Workout, even lightly, to keep your depression/anxiety in check.
3. Keep talking or writing or singing about the person you lost. It helped process ALL the feelings by letting my friends & family know the emotional details of my grief.
4. Look for signs from above, and write them down. It helps to remember those signs later down the road.
5. Pray. A lot. And out loud.
Now surviving life after the hard-core grief is different. You may not feel as raw as you once did. Your trigger might not get tripped every time any memory floats in and out of your brain.
Life just continues with less volume.
Less brightness.
Less love.
Less of your tribe.
But I guess if I really think about it, the only advice, and the most calming thing I do, is to continue to honor the person. Having regular visits to his gravesite, writing blogs/songs, having the girls make him something to put on his grave…basically keeping his memory as part of our family. I love to remind the girls by saying, “Man, remember when Paca went here with us? I wonder what he’d order this time if he was here?” Just to watch their eyes light up and remember him, and try and relate to him in his next actions. I want them… well really, I need them to remember.
This phase of grief also has a tone change from the hard core grief phase. The tone changes from your own sadness and selfish desires of having the person back, to a tone of sharing happy memories in an attempt that the person is never forgotten.
Bottom line: Real loss is the most important life lesson you will experience.
The primary lesson is pretty simple & obvious—-don’t take life for granted. When you love someone say it. Never go to bed angry because tomorrow isn’t promised. Ya know, all the standards loss cliches.
I personally feel like the lessons I’ve learned from loss, all surround the people left here on earth after the loss. I’ve noticed that I now question my own actions a lot. And it really comes down to one basic question for my loved ones—if this is my last day or your last day on earth, did I handle the day right? Meaning, was I compassionate enough? Did I choose spending time with you or calling you over my to-do list? Was I listening closely enough to any angst on your mind, or did I let the busyness of life fog over our conversations?
I’ve noticed it has even made me pause and slow my roll with strangers. If someone in public is struggling with physically picking something up or moving something, did I stop and help them? If someone working in retail or a restaurant looks down or distressed or fogged over, did I ask them if they are ok or if I can help? Did I actually look at people today and make eye contact and smile? To me the scariest part of our quarantined/masked-up lives, is that people no longer make eye contact, or chit chat in the grocery line. We avoid each other like the plague. How many people that really needed someone to ask them how they’re doing, have gotten passed by today?
And honestly, I have to hope that as my littles watch me, they are learning how human-relationships trump any time-do list as well, right?
Loss is life-changing.
Loss is weird.
We all know, without a shadow of a doubt, that it will come to the doorstep of us all. I mean, really, it’s truly like taxes.
But regardless of what we know, regardless of what we’ve learned in life, regardless of what we see out our windshield or even in the rearview mirror, real loss is truly a sinkhole in life many of us struggle to ever climb out of.
That’s when our human interaction needs to kick in. We all end up in that damn sinkhole, every once in awhile you have to throw the rescue line… and every once in a while you have to be willing to catch it.
Keep an eye out folks. Be ready for that line, regardless if you’re pitching or catching.