For Life After Loss, A Time to Rest + A Time to Rise
Practices for responding to life's big + little losses (plus, something new is coming)
Let’s start on the common ground of loss. We all have experienced losses of different degrees and types.1 Loss is a part of our shared human experience though there are ways our culture unsuccessfully attempts to reject this reality.
Our ability to name, let alone honor our losses as such, is not as normalized as the loss experience itself.
But the naming is how we begin to live through and endure our lives riddled with losses and tears.2
When my infant daughter died in 2010, my Greatest Loss, I found it difficult to open my eyes each morning and even more difficult to swing my legs over the side of the bed and place my feet on the ground.
The only responses in the darkest days of this Great Grief were weeping, guttural groans, prayers of lament, and sleeping—lots and lots of resting in bed, even though there were days I feared falling asleep because it meant I’d have to awaken once again to my new nightmare-ish reality.
To breathe was often the greatest task at hand. For days, weeks, months, likely even longer, every minute of living after her dying was unbearable. I had to learn how to endure and cope with the unfathomable pain and my new, strange, disorienting life.
This loss, the Greatest Loss of my life, is not the only loss I have experienced, though it is one of the losses I have written about the most publicly.
I could list a litany of other losses that would include the deaths of my father, other relatives, and even pets. There would be other losses as well, like those that come with being a child of divorce, changes in friendships, relocations and moves, and more. Then, there are secondary losses and ambiguous losses like losses of identity, safety, dreams, and more.
Many of us experience losses across the spectrum that change life (and our very selves). The list of losses we can all experience is endless, really.
How do we endure the losses, changes, disappointments, devastations, and difficulties we encounter?
What do we do with our grief and despair?
What I have found to be most important is to start by naming our losses and orienting ourselves to where we are in our story.
When I started writing this piece (which was prior to my recent encounter with appendicitis), the Christian faith community had just celebrated Easter. While I did not plan for this synchronicity, the echoes of spiritual themes from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, as you read, will likely be evident.
There is a path from death to resurrection that offers us a light for our own paths.
As you read, consider naming where you find yourself so that you can know what you need.
The first natural response to loss or death of any sort is lament.
Lament is crying out from the depths of agonizing sorrow and wrestling with honest questions (often with God).
After a time of weeping and lament in that dark night comes exhaustion. The only proper response here is to rest, as one does in on any given night.
If you’ve been here, you know that this place can feel a bit like a hibernation. What if we understood this deep cavernous pit as a place to rest—physically, spiritually, emotionally, and mentally? What if relief comes to us in this counterintuitive way of going into the pain, expressing it, and then just being? Maybe here we are able to welcome in a deep spiritual ministering that we receive.
Even when God has seemingly fallen silent or when the dark nights and difficult moments feel like they’re just going to persist forever (aka perceived permanence)—in this time that sometimes feels like a death of ourselves or spirits—hidden work is happening that we have nothing to do with.
We hopefully encounter the Deep Love that meets us in this Dark Place through lament.
In the past year and a half, I’ve walked hundreds of people through the practice of written lament with the Rest Journal for Lament and workshops related to writing your grief and finding healing.
But what happens after lament?
In time, the night eventually breaks, light returns, and life is ready to begin again.
Eventually, dead bones come to life,3 we experience a resurrection of our spirits, and we find the gumption and fortitude to rise up out of our beds and start anew.
At this stage, to borrow words from Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, we become ready to rise to the occasion of our lives.4
But how?
After difficulty, disappointment, or deep grief, we’re not ready to just jump out of bed and start thriving, blooming, and acting like everything is fine.
Life holds remnants of the hard. And sometimes, the life we return to is not the life we once knew.
It remains difficult to rise and do that when the fabric of your life has been destroyed or permanently altered, especially without your asking or approval. A new path has been charted for you and so you may need a new map and new tools for coping and living. And you, too, have been changed and wear the tender scars left by loss. For those whose losses have been any bit traumatic, you will understand how the past has etched its way into your bones and your mind.
It’s time to rise and persevere—and you need support.
This part of our journey also requires tools—just different ones.
You need a way to honor the painful parts of your story, express your honest emotions and daily struggles, remind yourself of your autonomy, and tap into the beauty and goodness of life amid all the terrible troubles.
I’m proud to share that I created a new journal for those of you who are ready to rise and persevere.
If this resonates, stick with me as I start sharing more about this new journal, including its title (have you guessed it yet?), framework, features, cover, color, release date, and more!
Yes… something *new* is coming.
A favorite book recommendation on this topic is Rachel Marie Kang’s The Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Losses.
Please read that as tears as in /ters/ (meaning to rip) or as tears as in ‘tirs (as in the salty drops that form in our eyes when we cry). Both are fitting.
See “The Valley of Dry Bones” in Ezekiel 37:1-14.
“Your life is an occasion. Rise to it.” —Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium by Suzanne Weyn
Nice!
This was very well said and resonated so much with me and my own journey of losing my daughter. Thank you for sharing. 💜