What do I do when loss feels like a life sentence?

This is a question I have long pondered. And indeed, I was recently asked this very question. I consider half a dozen losses in my family alone, half of them decades-old, and it isn’t as clear cut as saying loss is like a life sentence.

It can certainly feel that way. It feels that way when we have no hope to compensate for the loss. “A hope deferred makes the heart sick,” Proverbs 13:12a says.

For so many people loss doesn’t involve grief that lingers like a life sentence. But if you ask these people, they would probably say that their loss changed them. Would they have chosen to be changed? Probably not. But, as they rationalise it, it is what it is.

I think about young children who lose a parent or a sibling, or a parent who loses a child, or a spouse who loses their partner. Their lives are unimaginably transformed. They learn to carry a presage of sadness they can cherish.

Nothing of what has happened would they choose. None of it do they wish to accept. There is nothing about the new situation that is enjoyable or even palatable. There is a look in the face of this person. It’s a look of all-too-real, surreal dread. And yet what is possible is something incredibly unbelievable. The look in the person’s face becomes one of tempering. They are softened by calamity. They have no choice. We have no choice.

The grief that crushes a hope we often took for granted — and so many blessed realities that we ought to be thankful for we do take for granted — finds its hope in something utterly unanticipated.

We never like to contemplate this. And it seems so aberrant. To think that somehow our hearts adapt to the new normal, that might feel like a life sentence, but perhaps is the gift of brokenness that completes our journey of life. It is so hard to write these things. They feel uncomfortable to say. They seem to almost betray fairness for the human condition.

From a faith perspective, I like to think that God doesn’t so much bring suffering into our lives, but that he can use it magnificently. I say this because I believe it through brutal experience.

I never truly knew God until I suffered,
not that you must suffer to know God.

Until loss broke in and entered my life through grief,
I had no idea that life could thieve like it did,
and yet, being open to God
because I didn’t know how to live through it,
I found God, and the true compensation that leads to life.

What may feel like a life sentence feels that way for an extended period. We come to think of our lives as taking an eternity, when we have absolutely no grasp over the endlessness, or infinite constancy, of eternity.

Grief and loss cost us a year or two or ten or twenty or forty. It can take that long to adjust. But through faith we can find meaning, because the grief we experience from loss invites us into an astonishing worldview.

Out of the portent of grief, because of the loss that cauterised our connection with our past, we are invited into only two options for how life is now to be perceived.

The first option is to see it as a life sentence that has no hope. This becomes the default. And seemingly all people must overcome this option by preferring the second option.

The second option is to look up and out and beyond everything we have ever known, and not so much to throw out everything we know, but to be open to learning so much more. This second option necessitates a departure from the thinking of the first option. This second option is happily prepared to start over knowing and insisting on nothing.

That’s a journey!

At one and the same time we must face
the reality of our grief and look beyond it.

I’m not sure if we can do that without God. And faith in our Lord was made for experiences of loss that yield us to grief.

The only way to get past this life sentence thinking is to think curiously into the wonder that we yet do not know what we soon may know. And that soon enough we will know why these things have happened and why we feel the way we feel, and that even if we never find the meaning we are after, that we learn strength, compassion, forbearance, and humility from facing and accepting a mystery.

These things do happen. They grow us up.

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash