If this year has provided me with anything, it has been the opportunity to experience and deal with loss. Three days before the yearly calendar turned, my dear, sweet daddy breathed his last. It had been such a long journey and I am so grateful my mother was by his side just as she had been for the last 72 years. And since that day, I have received numerous calls, texts, and messages alerting me to more loss: neighbors, friends, spouses, parents, even children. Some had “died in rank;” others “out of season,” meaning they died way too young. Throw in there three loved ones who are in different stages of dementia … the slow goodbye … and the fact that I am in and out of a nursing home (which could also be called a “home of dying”) on an almost daily basis, it can be very overwhelming. Am I at that age where the graph of my life gets darker with loss or have I just become more aware of the pain and separation that loss brings?
Each loss has brought its own dynamic and intensity; obviously, some more severe than others. Of course, a sadness of one degree or another has been attached to all of them for me, but there have been a few that if someone had gouged a kitchen knife into my gut, it wouldn’t have hurt any more than the hole left by the loss of the loved one. I am also aware that at the other end of every grief I experience is one who knows the cut of the knife just as or certainly more severely than I.
Whereas many will say “give it a year,” I know that’s not always the case. When a dear friend recently called the name of my brother who has been deceased almost six years now, I unexpectedly and surprisingly yelped in pain. He immediately apologized, but the truth is that we don’t want to forego the calling of names. We don’t want to forget. We need and want to keep their presence alive in the earth.
I stood around a table with five ladies a week ago with a beautiful mirrored tray littered with candles. (Ironically, this had been passed down from a deceased great aunt.) One by one, each of us lit a tea candle in memory of a loved one lost to death while soberly calling their name. It was a beautifully, sacred time … of remembering people who made up the fabric of our lives.
I’m also no longer naive enough to believe that loss can’t come in other ways than last breaths. It can present itself in forms of job transfers to another city or across an ocean. It can be a loss of a relationship in a myriad of scenarios. All still carrying the heavy weight that loss brings.
Yes. Loss. It’s common to all.
If we have learned anything, even from our first breath, is that in the midst of gains, joys and successes, life also gives us losses, sorrows, and failures.
The question begs: what do we do with that?
May I suggest we give an “Alleluia.”
In her book, “Uncommon Gratitude,” Joan Chitterster writes, “Alleluia is not a substitute for reality. It is simply the awareness of another whole kind of reality. … One of the oldest anthems of the church, alleluia means simply ‘ALL HAIL TO THE ONE WHO IS.’ It is the arch-hymn of praise, the ultimate expression of thanksgiving, the pinnacle of triumph, the acme of human joy. It says that God is Good — and we know it.”
Later she writes, “What’s to thank God for in cases like this where nothing seems to take the pattern we devise for it: no father as you grow, no family as you age, no friend as a faithful companion as you explore the world around you? … How can anyone possibly say thank you, alleluia, God be praised for this?”
After listing a number of appropriate ways we can offer uncommon gratitude, she says, “There is a perspective that comes from loss and change, from death and endings, that can be gotten no other way. Death changes the landscape of both the present and the future. It enables us, sometimes for the first time in life, to see the things we too often miss: the value of time, the richness of fun, the balm of talk, the rarity of intimacy, the measure of enough. … We find, in death and loss, that suddenly [earthly things] begin to pale, Perspective sets in and we begin to see more clearly now. Sometimes it is only in darkness that we can begin to see the light.”
And so we offer uncommon gratitude.
May each of us who are walking a season of loss be blessed with an ability to say, whether in a whisper or with a shout, our own “Alleluia” even if, especially if, the pain and grief remain.
“Winter, which strips the leaves from around us
Makes us see the distant regions they formerly concealed.”
Jean Paul Richter
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