There is no growth without pain and conflict and no loss that cannot lead to gain," says Lily Pincus.
Loss is a vital component of human life. From the moment we are born until we die, we experience loss on various levels. Loss is not just a negative experience but a transformative process that is part of our development and growth. It requires us to leave behind something and lose something to move forward and evolve. We experience losses throughout our lives, and yet we tend not to acknowledge these losses except when they are ‘significant’ - such as death or divorce. The first loss is experienced when the baby leaves the comfort of its mother’s belly. Later, as toddlers, we have to leave the security of our homes to gain autonomy by entering the world of peers and the school space. Much later, as an adolescent, he will have to challenge parental norms to break free from childhood positions and dependencies and form an identity. Even in happy transitions, there are losses that are as big as the gains, i.e., parenthood, especially the first time, presupposes changes and redefinitions both at the personal level and the level of the couple. We experience loss in many forms daily in our lives. As such, it is an integral part of life itself. In small doses, loss and absence are the driving forces of creation, thought, imagination, and desire.
When death finds us
“One day there is life . . . and then, suddenly, it happens there is death.” ― Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude
Every time a person we love dies, we die. Death and the pain that accompanies it is an integral experience of our lives since we will all face it at some point. Humans are the only species aware of its mortality and death, which is the only defacto experience for everyone. We apprehend death through the death of our loved ones and people around us. Beyond any doubt, the death of our important ones is one of the most challenging realities we face and will face throughout our life span.
Death crashes our certainties, the predictable and expected. We experience our self fragmented since the death of a loved one signifies many losses and not only the loss of the person. We lose the human, we lose the roles this human had in our lives, and we lose hopes and desires about the future regarding the broken relationship and the human we lost. With the death of a loved one, we have to re-evaluate and redefine the goals and priorities in our lives. Essential relationships in our life play a vital role in how we perceive and define ourselves, and thus, through the death of a loved one, we feel that a part of us dies with them, and we need to redefine who we are and how we are gonna face and walk through life without this person. In short, we must create a new storyline about our life that is continued with new meanings and goals.
In 2019, unexpectedly, I lost my father. I was residing in Sweden when I received a phone call that I needed to return because he was gone. I never considered our relationship close; we barely talked on the phone and never had the father-daughter relationship you see in the movies. I thought of him as a very conservative person and, most of all, a patriarchal man. Basically a Balkan patriarchal man. I was sure and knew that he loved me, just not how I needed and wanted, which is an issue with most parental relationships. On the announcement of his death, I was shocked and panicked, but then Ι was overturned by a numbing calmness. I never believed that his loss would affect me; how can something affect you if it is already missing? And I remember thinking exactly that while being numbing calm at his funeral. As Joan Didion states in her book “The Year of Magical Thinking,” grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect, if the death is sudden, to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, and crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes." After I overcame the first shock of the announcement, I remember calmly preparing my luggage to fly back to Greece for his funeral. The whole time at the funeral and until we returned home, I remember how much I wanted to laugh cause all around me seemed surreal. Until someone brought the car my father used to drive, a red ute from Opel, into the garage. I remember the realization that the sound of this car’s machine, which meant my father had returned home, a sound I remembered since forever, will never tell his return again.
It took me many months to accept and actually grieve. At first, my biggest struggle was not with the actual loss but with the idea that life is not forever and for sure is not predictable and controllable. Even if you can control every aspect of your life story, you can not control when death will find you. Every death and its experience is unique, but it is also connected with previous losses, even the ones that are not solely around death. As they say, “Ends are not bad things; they just mean that something else is about to begin.” Similarly, death/loss entails rearrangements, reassessment of life goals and priorities, redefinitions, and changes in the roles of survivors and their relationships, who are called upon, on the one hand, to manage their intense emotions but also, on the other hand, to reinterpret their lives that were disrupted by the loss, and gradually move on to new positions and responsibilities, in the new realities of life that open up before them after the death of their loved one. The relationship with my mother had to be redefined on that route and set new foundations. The second wave of grief that came with this process caused all the pathologies of my mother’s character and the lurking troubles of our relationship to surfaced and made me realize that my father and his existence were the invisible buffer on all that. I was able to grieve the actual person and his absence when all the critical relationships in my life went through this transformation and redefinition, which, truth be told, was the transformation and redefinition of my values and who I am without my father and how can I keep living knowing that death can come any time.
And what is on the other side?
Grief comes in waves. In the first days, weeks, or months, you feel like you are drowning. Everything around you, small daily routines and things, reminds you of the person you lost. I remember how I could get on with my day and suddenly fall apart and stumble in tears when a similar car to the one my father used to drive would pass by me. I remember the panic and drawing inside the inheritance process and the bureaucracy. In the beginning, those waves feel strong and tall, crashing over you without mercy. You often strongly believe that you can not survive and that life will never be nice again. As time passes, the waves of grief do not come that often, although they are still strong and smash your whole existence. At least you can breathe, live, function, and have small moments of happiness. Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are not that tall anymore. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out. The waves never stop coming, and you don’t want them to since those waves are a connection with the person you lost. As a Greek saying goes: “Life pulls you by the hair.”
Searching for meaning through the grieving process
As I have mentioned a couple of times in this essay: “Ends are not bad things; they just mean that something else is about to begin.” This violent and sudden ending made me return to my homeland and, together with my career, start working on the small farming land that belonged to my father’s family for some generations. Most of all, it made me somehow accept that I can not control everything in life, and that is ok; I can keep enjoying today even if I do not know what tomorrow will bring, at least most of the time. I found meaning again.
Side Note
Various grief rituals exist worldwide. Singing special mourning songs with others who had lost their loved ones was common in Greece. As we entered the new centuries, this custom faded. Although I could not participate in something like that, I now understand its necessity and how grief and pain are divided when shared while happiness is multiplied. I would recommend those books: Lament From Epirus by Christopher C. King and the Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion