Anam Cara

Towards a Philosophy of Loss

Life is rich and generous in her gifts to us. We receive much more than we know. Frequently life also takes from us. Loss is always affecting us.

A current of loss flows through your life like the tide that returns eternally to rinse away another wafer of stone from the shoreline.

You know the sore edges in your heart where loss has taken from you. You stand now on the stepping stone of the present moment. In a minute it will be gone, never to return. With each breath you are losing time. Absence is the longing for something that is gone. Loss is the hole that it leaves. The sense of loss confers a great poignancy on your longing. Each life has its own different catalogue. Some people are called to endure wounds of loss that are devastating. How they survive is difficult to understand. Each of us in our own way will be called at different times to make its sore acquaintance. From this angle, life is a growth in the art of loss. Eventually, we learn to enter absolute loss at death. In Conamara, when someone is dying, they often say “Tá sí ar a cailleadh,” i.e., She is dying—literally, “She is in her losing.”

In a certain sense, there can be no true belonging without the embrace of loss. Belonging can never be a fixed thing. It is always quietly changing. At its core, belonging is growth. When belonging is alive, it always brings new transitions. The old shelter collapses; we lose what it held; now we have to cross over into the beginnings of a new shelter of belonging that only gathers itself slowly around us. To be honest and generous in belonging to the awkward and unpredictable transition is very difficult. This happens often in friendship and love. Your relationship may be changing or ending. Often the temptation is to suppress this, or avoid it or cut it off in one brutal, undiscussed stroke. If you do this, you will not belong to the changing, and you will find yourself an intruder on the emerging new ground. You will not be honourably able to rest in the new belonging because you did not observe the dignity of painfully earning your passage. Loss always has much to teach us; its voice whispers that the shelter just lost was too small for our new souls. But it remains hard to belong generously to the rhythm of loss.

The beauty of loss is the room it makes for something new. If everything that came to us were to stay, we would be dead in a day from mental obesity. The constant flow of loss allows us to experience and enjoy new things. It makes vital clearance in the soul. Loss is the sister of discovery; it is vital to openness; though it certainly brings pain. There are some areas of loss in your life which you may never get over. There are some things you lose and, after the pain settles, you begin to see that they were never yours in the first place. As the proverb says: What you never had you never lost.

Loss qualifies our whole desire to have and to possess. It is startling that you cannot really hold on to anything. Despite its intensity, the word “mine” can only have a temporary and partial reference. Ironically, sometimes when we desperately hold on to something or someone, it is almost as if we secretly believe that we are going to lose them. Holding on desperately cannot in any way guarantee belonging. The probability is that it will in some strange way only hasten loss. True belonging has a trust and ease; it is not driven by desperation to lose yourself in it or the fear that you will lose it.

The loneliest wave of loss is the one that carries a loved one away towards death.