What Death Teaches Us

LOSING MUM in 2022 taught me that no matter how much we prepared for her passing, we never truly believed she would be taken from us.  Strange as that is to comprehend 3.5 years later.  As I say at every funeral I officiate, “death always catches us by surprise.”  

Losing Mum taught me that losing a parent is different than losing a child.  These lessons also seem so obvious now, as if I should have always known.  

You will no doubt be reading this conscious of your own precious losses, and I invite you to bring that to your present thanksgiving awareness right now.  Take a moment to honour it.  

We grieve because of love,
that most bittersweet
of concepts in this life.  

When we lost Nathanael in 2014, in spite of the pain of losing him, something was added to me.  I also learned that I grieved better for his loss — with a ton more acceptance — than I had when I lost my first marriage in 2003.  

It was useful to me to observe this in the gait of my grief, over and again — it helped me to face the fact that I was better off for an initial grief that I’d endured a decade before.  

I’d learned an acceptance wisdom that has served me ever since.  The wisdom of letting go.  This is a wisdom that benefits our whole lives, and as our lives always ripple into others’ lives, theirs is benefitted from our benefit, too.  

When I lost a career that was very dear to me — at the time, the centre of my identity — it taught me that my identity was in the wrong place.  So many times I’ve had to learn and re-learn this lesson — a thing that’s stuck a little more in 2022 and then again even last year.  I don’t pretend that I have arrived, I expect to learn more in future on this lesson, but there are some things I’ve completely let go of that needed to be let go of.  

An everyday non-religious way of positing the truth of Job 1:21 summarises a key juncture of our development: 

“Life gives and the Life takes away,
blessed be Life for what we learn.”    

Only when we learn the lesson of accepting the
loss of things have we mastered the key lesson in life.  

The purpose of loss is shrouded in what we gain, what we learn, what we glean; yes, from within the caverns of pain we find ourselves in, from within the fissures of desolate disconnection we endure.  

Never more true: out of loss there is gain.  Spiritual gain for what we learn.  For the wisdom to live life well.