The Art of Losing

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

-excerpt from “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop

Life keeps getting smaller and smaller.

It feels as though I just keep losing huge, integral swaths of my life. I lost my husband and my dad — losses that demolished my emotional foundation and rearranged all my familial relationships and friendships. I left the apartment and the city where I lived with my husband for our entire married life. I lost my sense of safety and security in the world. I’ve even lost parts of myself.

Now, along with everyone else, I’m grappling with pandemic-imposed isolation and uncertainty.

Sometimes it seems we lose one thing and then we just keep losing things. We lose bigger, more important things. We lose things at an accelerated rate. We lose things before we’re ready to part with them. We lose another thing when we’re in the midst of trying to recover from the last thing we lost.

I’ve been struggling with how to rebuild my life, how to recover the basic pillars that make life worth living: love, connection, community, meaningful work, creative inspiration. I was already struggling emotionally when I lost my husband (the sudden loss of my dad was an incredibly destabilizing experience). And I was already traumatized and grief-stricken when the pandemic hit less than a year and a half after losing my husband.

It occurs to me that life does not always give us the breathing room we need after a horrifying and painful event. Life does not always space out tragedies so that we’re on solid ground when another catastrophe strikes. Life respects no one. That last one is a phrase I’ve heard repeated over the years. When I was younger it used to strike me as cold, harsh and unfeeling. Now, I find the phrase to be uncannily accurate.

There is so much grief in the world right now, both individual and collective. There are so many people who were suffering very deeply before the pandemic, who were hanging on by a thread before unforeseen circumstances piled on more pain. And virtually all of us have endured added suffering as a result of all that’s going on in the world — COVID-19, police brutality, sociopolitical unrest, economic uncertainty.

For me, it feels as though the chaos and terror of my internal world has spilled over into the external world. There is chaos within and without.

What strikes me about my personal losses, and also the losses we’re collectively experiencing, is the lack of a sense of agency. A sense of agency is what seems to distinguish difficult but surmountable losses from intolerable, catastrophic losses that strip a person to their core (such as loss of a loved one).

Losing keys, a watch, whole cities and former lovers — these losses run the gamut from simply frustrating to utterly heartbreaking. But the person doing the moving or the breaking up usually has some say in the matter. As painful as it may be, making big changes and leaving things behind involves personal agency, and, perhaps, just a tiny bit of satisfaction when all is said and done.

But losing a loved one is different. Having the two most important people in my life ripped away from me suddenly, without warning, has left me with such an abject sense of helplessness that I struggle to put it into words. There is such a strong, intense need to DO SOMETHING about my circumstances, but there is nothing I can do to change what happened. My losses are permanent. All I can do is try and find a way to survive this pain, try and figure out how to harness some semblance of meaning and purpose in life again. I’m grasping at straws.

When everything has been turned upside down, when any illusion of control has been shattered, I find that I have to take things day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute. I can’t worry about next month or next year. All I can do is get through today. I meditate every day. I go for a walk every day. I write in my journal every day. It may not seem like much, and my natural inclination is to gloss over these daily rituals and direct my attention to the elephant in the room: that is, how to piece back together the wreckage of my life. But the reality is that I can’t fix that overnight. There is no magic bullet that will take me from my current broken-hearted and shattered existence back to some semblance of the life I had before all the tragedy. It’s baby steps. It’s one tiny step and then another and another. I keep trying to make one giant leap into some unknown but less painful future.

Although it was against my will, I’ve practiced losing farther and losing faster. Now I’m just trying to find moments of peace, day-by-day, minute-by-minute.