Learning How To Deal With Grief, Loss, and Absence

Over time, the initial pain of grief gives way to the dull ache of absence. People think this is because grief shrinks over time. I think it is more that we grow used to it, and the sharpness of its edges is changed into something else. I think that grief over times ends up being experienced as absence.

You might think that this is pretty obvious. Of course grief becomes Absence – the whole point of grief is missing something or someone that isn’t there anymore. But there is a kind of gravity to the absence that remains once grief becomes dull.

This is an absence that is more than a lack of something. It’s hungry. It swallows up the future as well as the past. This is one of the long-term consequences of grief; the collapsing of time where past, present, and future all intermingle together. The loss in the past lurches forwards to take away things in the present and future as well.

We Can Grieve for any Loss

To be clear, when I talk about grief I don’t just mean because of losing someone we love, although that is what we most commonly associate grief with. Grief can come with any kind of loss. The loss of a person is just the most obvious. Whether a loved one, a friend, someone we know that was important to us, or even someone we don’t know but who was a significant figure in our life. Think about the grief expressed and felt at the loss of a celebrity or figure such as Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth, or more recently Ozzy Osborne for example.

Grief can also come from the loss of an object, such as a treasure possession, or our home, or our first car for example. These things were more than just objects. They were significant for us. They helped us know who we are and where we are. Their loss left a gap.

Grief could also be from the loss of a job, or a position in society or community, from the loss of status or responsibility, or from the loss of a sense of belonging. This kind of loss can be incredibly hard to process because we don’t always associate the loss with a feeling of grief.

Then there are the losses which come in the breakdown of relationships. Whether friendships, romantic partnerships, or marriages. Our sense of self had been invested in those relationships. In some ways they helped to shape who we are. With their loss, we experience the pain of grief.

Being Fractured

The common experience is of a feeling of being fractured. The pain of loss comes from losing something or someone or someplace that helped to give and inform and shape our sense of identity and self. The loss is not just of the person, but of what they meant for us and who they helped us to be. The same for the loss of a place or object or position or relationship or a belief. The loss leaves us reduced. There is a gap. An Absence.

The initial grip of grief, with all its pain and fear, with the forgetfulness and anger and denial and every other emotion and non-emotion and emptiness and numbness that goes with it, eventually becomes part of our life. It is absorbed into our identity. It loses its power to rob us of joy and is instead slowly softened and tempered into another fragment of our identity. That is, if it is managed healthily.

But even when grief is managed healthily, something still remains. Something that still has the power to trouble us and disturb us. Augustine wrote about this in his Confessions. He spoke about losing his best friend, and how his friends absence, which has once presaged his arrival, now marked a void which could not be filled. The absences of his friend were not just the physical absence, but the absence of confident, of emotional support, or shared companion.

There have been similar experiences of absence for me. An obvious one is how the grief of losing my dad five years ago has slowly transmuted into this kind of absence. When I want to talk about work. Or when we our children reach a new milestone. Or when I passed my PhD. There was an absence there which swallowed up part of that experience, like a black hole sucking into it the light spinning around it.

That’s what I mean when I say that absence has a gravity to it.

Another example was when I first became a cadet at William Booth College.  For the previous three years I had worked there as part of the in-service training team. My friends and colleagues were there and my life had a rhythm of travel and meetings and teaching which came to an end when I became a cadet. My siblings cadets probably had similar experiences of loss, particularly loss of identity, in the transition from employment to being a cadet.

However, for me, I was still in the same place. My work friends were still there. Someone else took on my job. The same weekly rhythm of meetings and cake and tea and easy banter and deep conversation went on without me. But I was still there, in the middle of it, but no longer part of it. My colleagues and friends had become my teachers. The continuing presence of the people around me only depended the absence inside me because I was no longer part of it.

The absence which is at the heart of grief is not only for what is lost. It is for all those future events and experiences that are lost as well. It is the hungry emptiness which lurks behind our joy, always colouring it with what could have been but isn’t going to be. It is the sudden feeling you get when you suddenly plunge down a rollercoaster and your stomach drops out of you that comes when you realise that there is something or someone missing.

We cannot fill that absence. We may want to. This is one of the ways that we unhealthily respond to grief. We try to fill that gap with stuff, with people, with a new relationship, with a new job, with a new project. But that absence is too hungry and will swallow whatever is put into it. It takes and it takes and is never full. We cannot fill this gap, this absence, in our lives, but we can rob it of it’s power to harm us.

We Cannot Fill The Absence

When we accept that there is now this absence in our life, when we acknowledge it as part of who we are, then we start to rob it of it’s hunger. The loss that we have experienced has helped to shape us into who we are as much as the thing or person that was lost to us. C. S. Lewis wrote that the degree of the suffering we feel after a loss is the same degree of love that was felt for what was lost. The same is true here. When we address that absence, that pain, as part of our love, then it slowly ceases to be something that robs us of our joy.

Then, the important part, is not to let the absence and the grief consume us and subsume our identity. We cannot let our loss define us. There is always the danger that the absence is will feed on our identity until all we are is absence and grief and pain. This way leads to destruction. Accepting that our loss is part of us is not the same as saying that we are our loss. We need to be really careful on this point.

Finally, the power of absence is in its ability to lead us into despair. This is where we must choose hope. Even when it doesn’t feel possible. We need to cling to the hope, to the promise, that where things are today is not how they will always be. Our pain and hurt is not going to be forever. The night we are in will eventually give way to the sunrise. This is perhaps the primal act of faith – to believe in what cannot be proven, to have hope it what cannot be seen.

The absence loses its power when we can have hope for our future that is not dependent on being whole but rather on being accepted and loved as we are. That has been my experience as well.

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