The Gift of Loss

As 2020 wanes and a new year rests just under the horizon, there’s been much said about the uniqueness of this year. While 2020 winds down, and families settle in for whatever Christmas celebrations they’ll have, I find myself wondering how people really feel about the year, and the way it’s all unfolded. 

And I don’t mean the feelings that we’ve all seen. Not the visible anger and hatred, or the frustration and exhaustion. Not the snarky posts on social media. I wonder what feelings lie beneath the surface. The things we share with only a few people, or allow our minds to indulge in moments of lonely quiet. 

The period between Christmas and New Year has always been for me a cocktail of reflectiveness and melancholy. The temporal timestamp of the holidays, mixed with the slower pace of the days, pulls my mind inward and forces me to consider my actions, and reactions, to the previous year – as well as speculation about how I might do better at the turn of the calendar. 

This year – this odd, unpredictable, awful year – is forcing me to think about what we’ve lost. Because I think whether we readily admit it or not, we’ve all lost something in this year. Our modern-day plague has forced an alteration to the course of our lives. Even those who think the virus isn’t real, is politically motivated, is overblown, etc., have not escaped its wrath. Efforts to live a “normal” life have been met by people who saw things differently and measures and reactions that intruded into our lives. 

It seems one of the things we’ve collectively lost is a sense of control. Humans are funny creatures. We, of all the animals in nature, carry in our spirits the idea that we can control our environment. While other animals work to find shelter and food and what they need to survive, we carry at once the drive to survive and the cognitive belief that we can shape and control our world to make survival not just viable, but more comfortable and of our own design. There is some evidence to support this. We heat our homes in the winter, cool them in the summer, and many people are alive today because of the wonders of modern medicine and the human mind. 

Yet, confronted with an invisible attacker we had to concede there are things we can’t control. At least not for a while. 

But at the micro level – in our personal space and in our daily lives – the loss feels much more personal. Nothing about 2020 has gone the way I expected. And it came with a cost. This pandemic took from me time with the people I love the most. It took the freedom to travel, and robbed me of some of the plans I had made and the hopes I had carried. I couldn’t go see my brother, and I couldn’t just run over to a friend’s house whenever I felt like it. I couldn’t pull a group of people together for an impromptu dinner. I’m an extrovert – I can’t hardly process my thoughts without other people to bounce them around with. So I’ve gone a touch mad in a world that requires isolation. I miss my friends. And I have given few hugs this year, and that might be the worst. 

But in all of this I am lucky; hundreds of thousands of families are gathered right now, on the Eve of Christmas, with deep sadness. And loss. For them, Christmas Morning and the dawn of New Year will serve as painful reminders of their own, deeply personal, loss. A reminder of who should’ve been here, but isn’t. The usual traditions, habits, phrases, and moments, gone for the first of what will be many more times. Because of something we can’t control, despite our wealth, intelligence, or drive.

I have long thought that as we navigate life, our world should grow larger. We should meet more people, learn more skills, and gather more experiences – and that we should always feed our minds with new and exciting information. But there are times – such as this – when it makes sense to make our world smaller. To ignore the external, and center our existence on those few things that really, truly matter. Times of crisis and chaos seem appropriate times to retreat and retract inward. 

I have experienced loss before. 

The deeply-personal-soul-wrenching-not-sure-I’ll-make-it-through-this kind of loss. Somehow, the idea that we’re all losing something together is supposed to feel better. But I’m not sure it does. Each loss, no matter how widely shared, is experienced on an individual level. Each of our losses is unique. Each of us has to forge our own path through the trial of fire, and determine how we want to emerge on the other side. I hope as we emerge from this year, we’ll all take time to evaluate the underlying reasons for our feelings. I’ve learned that anger isn’t an emotion on its own – it’s the unrecognized manifestation of some other emotion – such as fear, or loss.

In past moments of loss, the best tool I found to get through was a purposeful and intentional recognition of gratitude. I forced myself to write down each day three things for which I was thankful. Somedays, the best I could manage was that I would be asleep soon and this pain would stop. Or that at long last this day was done, and tomorrow couldn’t possibly be as horrible as this one, or the one a few days before. What I found in those moments of loss is that given the chance, I can learn more about myself, and more about what really matters in this life.

I’ve found that exercise important in 2020, thought admittedly I haven’t deployed as often as I should’ve. This year has been filled with unpredictability and uncertainty, tinged with fear and anger, violence, desperation, and despair. It has tested our ability to rise above the chaos, and in some cases, we’ve not met the challenge. Sometimes, I’ve not met the challenge. 

Still, I have much reason for the gratitude in my heart. 

No one I love has died. 

I haven’t ended up in the hospital. 

I have friends who have grown closer to me than I could’ve imagined. 

I am relatively healthy, and I can still ride a bike. 

People have gone out of their way to show me how much they care about me. 

I have made enough money to pay my bills. 

I have work that I can put off by writing a blog post. 

I feel like I’m connected to a community. 

There’s more, but a longer list would be overboard. And it already feels unkind to those who in this time have lost their jobs, their homes, their health, and their resolve. I fear that for some, this year will prove unbearable, and may create a generation that completely loses hope. 

Whatever 2020 has in store for us in these last days, and in whatever unpleasant surprises 2021 might have in store, I hope that we can remember that the struggles of this year are likely to endure. And while for some of us it’s been a year of disruption and inconvenience, for some it’s been a time of undoing. That for some, the effects of this year will not soon be gone and might well affect succeeding generations. 

I’m not sure I’ve ever been as ready for a year to end. Or as ready for a new beginning to start. I hope I’ll manage better in 2021 than I did in 2020. And I hope that we can all get back to something a little closer to normal. 

Or, if not normal, at least weird together.