Loss

Loss is a universal human experience. We all suffer loss: it is the nature of life. Some suffer financial losses, losses of mobility or function or health, and many lose direction, unable to bounce back. In recent weeks, I have been surrounded by so much loss, loss that is playing with my very soul.

Personally, I have lost a great friend, strong from day one, strong to the end, yet defeated by a terrible disease. Another friend, feeling he had failed his family, tried to take his own life. Although I could not know all that these people were going through, I tried to be there for them, because ‘that is what friends do’. Others close to me have lost as well.

I have started questioning my ‘self’ and myself as to why it hurts so much to lose, why it hurts so much to watch others lose.

My answer is the compassion that I carry for people around me, the ones that affect me both personally and the losses of others and how they also affect me.

It seems that compassion is like a chain reaction, one that goes on and on. A person is homeless and his or her family worries every single day as to where are they, and are they safe. This bothers me also, and I try to make a change.

We do not exist in a bubble (although more and more it seems that way). John Donne wrote that no man is an island. We are a community, and compassion allows us to rally around those who are troubled, even when we don’t understand or when we are uncomfortable with it.

It is not ‘our duty’ to understand or to be comfortable, but only to be there when they need help or to even provide our silent support … to bear witness. Then, when loss comes (and it will come), we can say with our heavy yet compassionate heart, that we tried, that we cared enough to be there for them, to bear witness to their pain. Our lives will always be better because of it, despite our own pain, our own discomfort, our own unawareness of what another’s loss means.

In a blink of an eye, loss occurs and life changes forever. Once gone, it is too late to go back.

Compassion allows me to say a little prayer of thanks for those coming into my life, for being. It also allows me to have the all too often painful privilege of caring about those around me who are suffering with their own losses, showing that I care.

I cannot change the loss, but I can be there.