Loving And Losing

Post 40 when you look back, you have loved enough and lost enough.

Childhood friends, pets, crushes or loved ones– beloved relatives one is inordinately attached to – or even places, and things – in which one seems to have invested a fragment of one’s innermost self and lost it over time.

As an only child of bitterly warring parents, I was perennially out of sync with their life plan and modus operandi, and in the absence of any caring sympathizer, turned to pets and often nature for solace.

Pets, as well as nature, I find, absorb and transmute the harrowing emotional suffering one experiences by their mere quiet presence. The still empathy or the inanity of their frolic provides a catharsis which no amount of human interface can replace. While this is all easy growing up as the psyche is still evolving and rather fresh and can resolve inner conflicts seemingly easily.

Problems arise in the young adult and the highly hormonal reproductive stage and after when by the looks of it one is grown-up but one finds oneself sorely lacking in inner resources that can abate the upheavals created by love or loss or simple displacement.

Looking back, when I lost my beloved grandmother at 18, I handled it a whole lot better than I did when over 2 years I lost our pet dogs one after the other. While one cannot trivialize the loss of a doting grandmother who really meant the world to me, losing our pets was more devastating because not only were they my babies in every sense of the word, but I had to interpret their loss and redirect the grief of my children who were hugely attached to them.

A miscarriage is another form of loss that having experienced twice over me, I find we are ill equipped as a society to handle or deal with. It is a sense of loss that is so deeply personal and ravages the core self in ways that cannot be expressed only experienced. As I write, memories of the deep hollow vacuum in one’s psyche come up- of a loss of something that you never had and yet you could have had, and you are left to grapple entirely alone with the dark side of not having.

An aunt I lost recently to me embodied everything that was relevant in my grandmother with a contemporary twist. Brutally honest, she brought up for me the fact that my acute sense of emotional vulnerability was not resolved but heightened by my grandmother’s helpless loving, given the fact that she herself was a dis-empowered woman. This revelation was like a blow to my gut since while I had always felt it intuitively, no one had ever pointed it out.

One of the core saying of Ramana Maharishi which I learned from one of my teachers Dr Paula Horan was ‘Don’t suffer over your suffering.’ To me, very few sayings have had such a profound influence and it is especially with regard to loss that I have found this stance highly relevant.

It is ironic that when one is young and suffering, one has not the benefit of experience to test these great sayings against- its only after one has suffered enough that one day there is an epiphany which really shows you the meaning of such lines and by then one is able to take the words and match them, arduously, into one’s naked reality.

While dwelling on the loss saps one of energy, loving despite repeated loss is not only restorative but teaches acceptance and expansion. No matter how vulnerable one is, the greatness of it lies in being open to life.