It is loss, not possession, that delivers us to the essence of things.

This has been a lifelong lesson. I am a connoisseur of loss, not by choice, but by nature and history. As I child, I felt deeply and therefore felt losses deeply. This, coupled with a tumultuous childhood, provided ample practice in sounding the depths, mapping a terrain that in retrospect seems like my natural habitat, though perhaps I was not destined to call it home. Can I imagine a parallel self who came through it all marvelously intact? If so, I don’t envy this person, because the truth is that loss is the best, perhaps the only, real teacher in the school of life.

This is probably because we are born to die. It’s in the physics of our DNA and our consciousness, this awareness that all material things rise and fall away, only to rise again. When I sat down to write this post, I thought I would riff on a quote I came across recently that goes something like this: the best way to protect your future is to create it. That’s a great insight, and very true, because when we try to protect things, we contract. We are defined by what we are trying to prevent. To create your future is to come from an entirely different place. And yet, as I reflected on it, I realized that even in this formulation, loss is key. Most often, when we think we are creating our futures, we are still reacting, devising some solution to a perceived lack, improving ourselves — all of which is past-based, or more to the point, fear-based. Our creativity turns out to be superficial, to lack real power. It is new furniture in an old room. To really create, we must first confront and make space for loss, that ogre in the closet. We open the door, we invite it into the light, and realize that the ogre’s face is our own.

Loss delivers us to the full measure of love.

In the last year, a very old friendship of mine broke down. This is a person that I share forty years of history with, but more than that, a person with whom I shared a private world, a kind of “us-ness” going back all the way to childhood. There are aspects of the relationship that intersect so seamlessly with my own sense of self that I can not separate the two. I could not turn against this person in my heart because to do so would be to turn against myself. I could not harbor anger with out hurting myself, and yet it became clear that the relationship was over.

I went through a period of intense dreaming, of literally meeting this person in dreams, experiencing aspects of the relationship more keenly than I was ever able to fully do in waking life. The essence of my erstwhile friend came into sharp relief, in the depths of my subconscious, in my heart of hearts. Here, in loss, in the least expected of places, there was this surprising sense of reunion, of becoming acquainted with this forty-year-long love in its entirety. A realization of its essential nature. No longer was I trying to prevent the loss of this friendship and therefore corrupting my own boundaries, my own sense of self; I was free to acknowledge that the essence of the relationship resided not in this world, but in another, in the world that is myself. Regardless of broken dynamics, that entity was immutable.

My parents are still alive, now in their mid-seventies. I am fortunate in this. A good friend of mine lost both parents when she was still in her thirties, as did my own mother. These early losses seem to violate the natural order. We’re not yet ready, if we ever are. The floor drops out from under us, and we fall and fall. When I turned forty, I started dealing with my parents’ eventual mortality (and my own) in a more conscious way. I wanted to be ready, I told myself, wanted to leave those relationships in a state of perfect completion, to take advantage of every moment, as if all those memories could be stored against the cataclysm, taken out and dusted off when they were needed most. And there is some wisdom in this; repairing, communicating, letting go, taking nothing for granted. But I see now I was also imagining an end-run around the crushing experience of loss, thinking that “perfect completion” might mean that the ultimate letting go wouldn’t hurt.

I suspect now that this is not possible, nor even desirable. I think now that we can only prepare ourselves so much for such goodbyes, can only touch realities that currently exist. And that, therefore, it is only when our loved ones are gone that we can become acquainted with certain shades of their essence, dimensions of our love, knowledge that simply cannot be grasped in the gross world of having and holding and fearing losing. The best thing, then, is to make room for that guest when it comes, to welcome the gifts and revelations of loss, perhaps even to discover a true and unshakable kind of “having” that can only be achieved by “losing.”

2020 has been a year like no other in my 51 years for realizing the bounty that loss brings: a cornucopia full of strange fruit, full of fear and vice that stinks to high heaven. How can this be good? But, of course, the visitor is our old friend from the closet, the ogre with a face we recognize, even if it is not the face we show to the world. 2020 has delivered us to what we value by taking it away. It has unleashed our fears, our prejudices, our basest impulses — out into the light of day. It has demolished crumbling infrastructures, physical, interpersonal, and internal. What will we rebuild? What will 2021 be?

It would be a shame to rebuild the world the way it was. The foundation had crumbled, even before the edifice fell. We have glimpsed what matters, even if the common ground is barely visible amid the rubble. If 2020 has taught us anything is that we can no longer pretend. We will either make this work, or we won’t, but with the ogre out and about, poking among the remains, I’m optimistic.

With loss on our side, how can we lose?

Here’s a poem I wrote in my mid-twenties on just this subject. My parting gift to a year like no other:

Lose

Cut away the flesh, cut
down to white bone.
A hard thing.
It will endure, jut
from a cliff wall, compete
with stones through the cold

indifferent ages.

Lose it now.

Don’t wait.

It will be your one triumph
against inevitability.
Lose me. Lose
your job, your ability
to communicate in a way that does not
anger. See

the bones in everything.

And when you have done it,
when even nightfall
brings no loss,
will you be merely safe
or free? Nothing human
left but what is tangible,
a record in a cave,
or something magnificent, wholly
new. A hard thing,
not measure by what it isn’t,

by what it was.

Lose it now.
Surprise the inevitable.

I really want to know.

Free image, compliments of https://www.pexels.com/@cottonbro