Because I am part of a community of writers and learners...

My classes do weekly blog posts. This is mine from last week.

Preface:

I find it a great privilege to be a part of this community of thinkers and writers. I appreciate the anxiety that can be induced by having an audience of your peers, and the expectation of responsibility we place upon each other to engage with the respect we all hope for ourselves. In spite of - perhaps in part because of - those challenges, and vulnerabilities, to have an opportunity to discuss big questions of being human, and to write not only with the aim of expressing those ideas, but of finding and cultivating a writer’s voice, is a rare kind of opportunity. And I have been squandering it.

One of my intentions for the new year is to schedule time in my days for writing. I decided before break that one of the ways I am going to do that is by responding to the weekly blog posts beyond just reading them and occasionally briefly responding to people.  (That this week’s topic is something so connected to my life this week is purely coincidence.) You don’t have to feel any obligation or pressure to respond to my post (no extra credit or anything).  In fact, I have held off on doing this for years because I don’t want it to be an intrusion. But as a learning community, we are all in it together; living up to that responsibility (which we have all chosen) is part of the challenge of choosing love over fear.  So I am going to give it a shot.

End of preface.   

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I am grateful for the kind condolences and generous spirit of support that I take from this post, and from everyone’s notes and emails. One of the things I have been grateful for this week is the buoyancy of love that has kept me afloat in a sea of loss. Loss takes various forms in all of our lives, and we all grapple with it in different ways, but the capacity to extend empathy to another person is one of the great gifts we have to share.

In my senior AP classes we have been using literature as a vehicle to discuss what it means to be human.  In one particular “fishbowl” discussion we were talking about Irvin Yalom’s Four Givens of the Human Condition. One of those four things that all human beings have to contend with is confronting the fact that we are mortal. That means that not only will we pass from the earth at some point, but that we will all experience a variety of losses while we are here.

Loss is is difficult. It is painful. It raises what ifs and questions of faith and belief and meaning and purpose. All of those things, while they can throw us off a comfortable footing, are terribly and beautifully human, and there are as many valid ways to respond to them as there are people on the planet.

One way we respond is undoubtedly by remembering.  If you asked me about my father when I was 17, I would have said I hated him.  If you asked me when I was in my 30’s or 40’s I would have told you it was not hate, it was anger (and a dose of adolescent angst) that I was stuck in. If you asked me today, I would say he always did the best he could, that he loved me, and that he was proud of me - things I was unable to see when I was younger.

Another thing that frequently comes with loss, for me, is perspective. Missing people, I think, is the universe’s way of reminding us what has been important in our lives. Perspective allows us to value good and bad memories, because they are all pieces of our stories, and our stories are the one thing in the world we wholly own.  Perspective reminds us of the potential in each day to live the best day we can, to do the best we can, to be willing to believe that most of the time, most people are doing the best they can. Perspective reminds us that sometimes we won’t live up to our best selves, and sometimes other people won’t either, but that as long as we have a tomorrow, we will have another chance.

For me,  another thing that comes with loss is a reminder of the importance of practicing gratitude and forgiveness. When I am confronted with loss - any kind of loss: death, betrayal, break-up,  a friendship that has run its course - I actively look for something to be grateful for. Not in that defense mechanism “I am grateful he is out of my life,” way, but truly grateful for something I have gained or learned because I chose allow that person into my life, or take some space in my thoughts.  

As powerful as gratitude is in my life, so is forgiveness - forgiveness of others, and forgiveness of myself.  Many people conceptualize forgiveness in that “forgive and forget” way.  That is not how I think of forgiveness. I believe profoundly in the power of forgiveness, but I am not naive to think that we forget. We can not undo our experiences, nor rewind the sense of being wronged. This is especially true in the case of loss. What we can do, however, is say “I am no longer going to hold on to this anger, fear, sadness, hurt (whatever it is) because I want to live peacefully, even joyfully, in today and move with that peace and joy into tomorrow, and holding on to that anger (fear, sadness, hurt)  is anchoring me to a past that I can’t change anyway.  

Whether my experiences with loss are my own, or the vicarous way I experience it in the lives of friends, teachers, students, people I see on television, or even when I read about Lily’s life in The Secret Life of Bees or Zeitoun’s in Zeitoun, along with the inevitable grief and the refiguring of some of who I am and how it fits my story, I think maybe I reach my deepest sense of my own humanity in the gratitude and perspective and empathy and love that come somewhere along the way.