Loss

Our weekends are falling into a pattern.  On Saturday, D does errands and enjoys the pool and the apartment, while I work my 5th day.  That night we stay up late, together, watching movies or reading or going out for dinner.  Sunday, we have a semi-leisurely breakfast time, go to the 9:30  UU service, and plan our afternoon drive.  Often that drive includes pulling over to check out open houses.  We are nowhere near ready to move, financially or organizationally, but we are looking.

Two weeks ago I added some Skype sessions to the mix.  It has been difficult to find time and focus to talk to friends or write to them, so it was a nice change.  I caught E at home with the visiting grand-kids and was introduced to Stripes and Spot (fuzzy, medium-sized stuffed animals, tiger and giraffe respectively.)  The laptop ran out of juice 27 minutes into the talk, and I plugged it back in at the office.  Then, as I was typing an apology to E, my cousin came online.  We had a brief chat, and he showed me the view from his new apartment window, overlooking the Olympic park.

He has it rough.

So, I was content.  I was connecting with loved ones, and I was comfortable, if broke.  Then, I went to church, and a clearly distraught minister came to the pulpit to announce, with forced calm, "This week we lost a child."  A 14-year-old boy had died in an Arizona plane crash, along with his best friend and his friend's father.  He and his family were involved church members, and apparently loving and lovely people.  The pilot was an ex-Olympian,  so it was on the news, and we'd heard about it.

Of course, I didn't know any of them, but both D and I started crying during the meditation and prayer.  It's a universal grief, the loss of the brightest and best, the loss of a future.  D of course was thinking of his son, but what was I thinking of?  I was thinking how every day the newspapers and news stations tell us of loss, and every day we say, oh, that's too bad.  And sometimes we think, "He was so young," or "What a tragedy," but we don't grieve, we don't sorrow.  We are distanced, we don't know the people, we don't care.

I find myself thinking about loss a lot.  I am facing the loss of a beloved home, and I have lost many friends and some family in the past several years, not to mention beloved pets.  I have lost my source of livelihood and many sources of joy.  And I have lost my self-confidence and self-respect, not to mention my serenity.

How much of this is in my control?  And does it help to think about it, to worry about future loss, to grieve past loss? Is there anything that I can reasonably do to safeguard what I have left?

I was talking with my Mom the other day, and we are in similar places, trying to build new lives in new homes.  While we are both giving up a lot of Stuff, that's not the real problem. We can focus on the frustrations and barriers to moving on, but the biggest barrier is the fear of loss.

We have no control over the fact of loss.  It's a given that we come into the world with nothing but ourselves, and we leave that way, too.  It's a given that, if you love, you will grieve.  In fact, I want to grieve.  I don't want to let something precious go without a thought, without a tear, and I want to have precious things in my life.

Which brings me back to the real loss.  The other day a friend, possibly an ex-friend, wrote that she didn't understand what happened to the creative, bright, productive person she once knew.  She misses that woman, and I do too.   I think that finding her again might be something in my control, if she ever existed.  Right now, it's hard to remember her, and that's the biggest loss of all.