From Loss to Recovery—How we “get there”

“From Loss to Recovery—How we “get there”

“How we deal with death is equally as important as how we deal with life”. If the number of losses a person suffers increases their knowledge base, then I am an expert! No worries, I am not going to be mellow dramatic or do the pity dance, but I am going to share how I think we “recover” from loss.

During the past 13 years I have suffered the loss of a dog, cat, horse, father, sister, mother, mother in law, another dog, another horse, a friend, a friends child, another friends child, a friends spouse, a friends 2 horses and two dogs, another friends dog, a colleagues child, another friends child ……and the list goes on of losses I have personally or indirectly suffered.

Now I certainly can qualify the various losses into categories of pain and suffering, all of course significant in their own way and different and unique to be sure. What they all had in common was “me”. Me and my sorrow. I consider myself to be a empathetic soul which has afforded me a great deal of “feeling with” those folks that I know have suffered losses.  I mention the empathy thing because I believe it separates a “good person” from a “bad person–there, I said it—Empathy is an essential part of being a good person. Being the “,most human” might be another way to put it. It is our empathy that allows us to experience not only another person’s grief, but our own. So this is the only caveat to my story. You have to have empathy to grieve and ultimately recover.

Now comes the recovery part. Do we ever really “learn” from our losses? Yeah, I guess we do, way later and after the dust settles. There is really nothing that quite prepares us for the loss of a loved one, no “How to” book. Notice that most everything out there is about the grieving process. As my dad would say, That’s a day late and a dollar short!”  Of course. And God bless the theorists that guesstimate what we should do, or how we should feel, act and behave. I suppose there are some “standards”. Maybe. So we muddle through. I guess my point is “how” we muddle through. How we recover.

The only truism for me is that time does in fact “heal”. Great thing this brain of ours, memory trace weakens, neural connections become more vague and we ultimately “heal”. The pain and immediacy of the event is not so vivid or present. Kind of like child birth. We do not truly “remember” the pain, We don’t experience it like we did when we gave birth. If we did, there would be a lot less humans in the world. So is the pain of loss. If we truly “remembered” the actual pain of when we first learned of or experienced the death of someone or some animal we loved, we would not have relationships, children or animals. And you can’t have any of those things without heartache. We would live completely isolated and alone. Not gonna happen.

So it’s a brain thing, a God thing and a “what we tell ourselves” thing that allows us to muddle through and ultimately “recover”. There is no magic, no special recipe or guide I can give you about how to recover. Sorry to disappoint. What I can say is who we surround ourselves with, what we say to ourselves and whether or not we take another chance on loving again, speaks volumes on how or whether or not we will recover. It doesn’t have to be at all graceful it just has to happen, eventually. The brain part is a “no brainer”.  It’s in our DNA, part of our physiology to “heal” from loss, to recover. It’s the emotional and spiritual recovery that’s so tricky and not a given. Dealing with life is the easy part, dealing with death, not so much.