Loss is love in all its fullness

Photo by Bryan Minear on Unsplash

GRIEF at a loved one’s passing or the loss of anything significant is the full payment for the love we had for that person or the hopes we had for that dream.

That might feel like a slap across the face, but when loss comes it throws us so far we realise just how much we must have loved, because what we cannot stop loving or needing is irretrievably gone.

We could not experience the fullness of the love we had for them, or the fullness of the hopes we had, for say the marriage we lost, or the fullness of the security we had before we lost our job, until the loss occurred, but grief is about experiencing the fullness of what is left behind. It must be reconciled.

Grief feels like exile and it demands reconciliation of the pain before we can experience restoration.

“Sometimes you don’t value what is real
until it becomes a memory.”
(Iman on David Bowie’s death, January 2016)

Why is it loss is so hard? Because love or need of what was lost is so deep. Unfathomably cavernous. So incredibly profound are those depths of love or need in what we lost that we only feel them fully in their completion when the end has come.

We cannot fully value who and what we love in our humanity within the constraints of time and consciousness; we are too human. But love comes full circle when the dream has died and reality morphs into never-coming-back eternity. We can be racked with guilt and regret. It is normal. The guilt may never seem to leave us. It is normal. We replay over and over and over again in our minds that which can never be reconciled how we’d like. And we come back to the same thing again and again and again. It is final. It is finished. And we pray that we can accept it with time. Thank God for the acceptance if and when it comes!

Experience loss and we do something amazingly brave — face the full force of our love, our need, our everything, to hold on knowing it won’t ebb, to hold on because it won’t let go. Sheer valour, because we have no choice but to go on.

Loss consummates love in an instant, and yet we go on experiencing that consummation day after painful day, with reprieves only for unconsciousness or fleeting realities of hope for that day when restorative works are accomplished.

Know in your loss that you are fully brave in your realness, fully devoted in your love, fully won to who/what was lost.