My Story: ON LOSS
Waking Up In Dark Places
Part 1
Part 2
My Big Four-Foot Drop
What is loss?
Loss is many things.
We encounter it a thousand times in a thousand forms in one short life.
We lose friendships, pets, relationships.
We lose jobs, homes, places we once belonged.
We lose plans that were certain, paths that were supposed to take us exactly where we wanted to go.
And often, more often than we notice, we lose pieces of ourselves along the way.
But loss, in its purest form, is not good or bad.
It’s a reality shift.
It’s the four-foot drop from one reality into another.
Contrast
Sometimes loss is clarifying.
We lose what we thought was friendship, only to discover, through contrast, what friendship actually is. Without that contrast, how would we know?
We lose a job we loved, only to realize it never valued us in return. That loss becomes the pressure required to recognize our own worth, confidence, and capacity. Often it’s the contrast of what we don’t want, what isn’t for us, that points us toward a reality more aligned with the light we carry.
And then there are the harder losses.
There’s the loss of what you never had.
Second-Hand Joy
Grieving the absence of love and relationships never experienced firsthand, a mother, a father, siblings, family. We watch it play out in movies. We see it in passing, in other people’s lives. We get a glimpse into how it was supposed to be.
Eventually, if we’re fortunate, that ache becomes smaller than our capacity to hold joy for others. Second-hand joy. First-hand joy doesn’t always know what it has.
Second-hand joy does.
And, finally, there’s acceptance.
Not resignation. Acceptance.
Not better. Not worse. Just different.
A different path.
Knowing
Then there’s the loss of knowing.
The loss that comes from finally experiencing what we always wanted, only to watch it slip through our fingers.
Loss is not always death as we know it.
It’s all the small deaths, some larger than others, but death nonetheless.
It’s the four-foot drop, the death of one reality into another.
My childhood was a series of small drops, grieving a life I never had.
My young adulthood was both finding that life and losing it.
My Mother
My mother died of cancer in our home, shared with my husband and son. She was terminal. I cared for her in her final days. Everything was expected. Planned.
But when it happened, when I no longer had to be strong, that was the moment I broke.
I woke in the chair beside her bed. In the night, she’d slipped away.
When the coroner came, I couldn’t watch them take her.
Even though I’d practically raised myself.
Even though I’d always been the adult.
Something about that moment made it undeniable.
I’m the adult now.
The weight of it put me on the floor, in the corner of our house, in the fetal position, crying inconsolably.
No one had ever seen me like that.
I’d never seen me like that.
Human.
Needing support instead of giving it.
My Grandfather
My grandfather died three days later.
During the weeks before my mother’s passing, he and my grandmother learned he had a brain tumor. They chose surgery. The operation was successful. The stroke afterward was fatal.
My family kept it from me. I had enough on my plate, grief layered on logistics layered on shock.
I don’t remember the call.
I remember the sensation.
Another section of flooring ripped out beneath me.
A tightrope stretched thinner.
My Husband
My husband was fighting a battle with addiction I didn’t know existed.
I wasn’t raised around drugs or alcohol. I didn’t recognize the patterns. All I knew was he was becoming less and less the man I knew.
After the double funeral, I found a spoon, crushed pills, and a lighter in his toolbox while looking for a hammer.
They didn’t belong together.
They didn’t belong in a toolbox.
His father had battled addiction his entire life. I called his mother. He went to rehab.
Later, I learned a truth that governs all addiction:
Everything comes second. Addicts put either their sobriety or their addiction first.
Everything and everyone else comes second.
When he returned, he showed me, consistently, that he’d chosen his addiction.
And just like that, my marriage was over. My family gone. My home emptied.
Everything of value taken.
Addiction has no bottom, and what I called home fell into it.
The last section of flooring gave way.
Only one thing left to take, but only I could take it.
And, oh, how I considered it.
Not out of hopelessness or despair, but because the pain of grief was becoming too much to bear.
Too much, almost.
My Son
My son was not my biological child, but I remember the day we chose each other.
His mother had died in a car accident when he was only months old. When I entered his life, he was one. I was the first woman his father dated after her death.
I was raised to keep my heart guarded, it was a survival skill. I moved slowly with both of them.
But once the gate opens, it doesn’t close.
I remember when and where I told him I loved him for the first time.
I don’t remember the first time he called me Mom, but I remember how it felt.
The One Reality That Never Dies
Many believe love is contingent – on biology, legality, circumstance.
I understand love differently.
I understand a love that leaves was never love.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.
My husband, my forever person in some part of my heart, ended his life after finally waking from a lifetime of addiction.
We remained connected, on and off, through the years. An unspoken knowing. We were each other’s people.
When he entered sobriety, it was as if he could see both worlds at once – who he’d been before addiction and who he became within it. He began calling more often. Late at night. Through channels meant to stay hidden.
I always believed we’d find our way back to each other.
We had one final conversation where he sounded like the man I once knew.
His last words to me were:
“I love you.”
“Thank you for loving us.”
I said it back.
I thought it was a beginning.
I didn’t know it was the end.
My son is alive, well, and estranged.
I had no parental rights. None.
Whether I’m still his mother in some part of his heart, I don’t know. If I’m not, that’s his path, and it may never cross mine again.
And that’s ok, because love bears all things, and it never ends.
Still, I pray:
That the imprint of love I left in his first six years outweighs the abandonment he might logically and reasonably feel now. That one day he understands I did not leave by choice. That had I been given one, our lives would look different.
What I know with certainty is this:
The love between me and my husband never left, through addiction, loss, or death. He visits me still. In dreams. In the crossing.
And the love I have for my son has never faltered. Not once. To this day, I remember the smell of his hair, the sound of his laugh, and the tenderness of his heart, just like his dad. If any of that has changed, my love for him has not.
Loss is the four-foot drop from one reality into another.
But love, if it is love,
goes with us
everywhere we go.