Revisiting Traditional Ideas of Loss: How to Make It Easier for Ourselves and Find Its Beauty

Loss is such a loose term that holds so much weight. Death, breakups, simply drifting away from people, arguments, personality changes, etc. encompass loss as a concept. It’s almost impossible to understand the word as having one definition. Considering this and the impact that loss carries, let’s alter our perspectives on it.

It’s so easy to say “Oh, let’s try and put a positive spin on this,” without truly understanding the scale of difficulty loss holds. Obviously, everyone deals with their own course of loss and there’s no linear, nor ‘right’ or ‘correct’ way to deal with it but once you’re able to turn your sadness, anger, hurt and negativity into something more abundantly positive, it’s truly liberating.

Finding gratitude in sadness is something I find comforting. There are so many sayings that reaffirm this: “Grief is the price we pay for love, “How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard?”, “Grief lasts as long as love lasts” and so on. Whilst somewhat cliché, these are all in one way or another correct. Finding comfort in the idea that you have lost someone or something so beautiful that it creates real life pain is almost a perfect way to revisit the pain of loss. Finding gratitude in the time, experiences and relationships we have had is so important and so precious. Whilst I don’t want to romanticise loss, and I know firsthand how challenging it is, I think trying to consider the beauty in our experiences is helpful in beginning to help us through such a difficult sentiment. 

It’s so far from easy to put a positive spin on the gut-wrenching concept of loss. One day, one minute, one second you have something and then the next, you don’t. Although this is something natural and embedded in every aspect of life, we find the lack of control, the unknown and the actual loss completely impossible to wrap our heads around. This is the hardest part: not having the knowledge or the control over loss. Having experienced loss in multiple forms, I know that it’s not easy. What makes it more manageable is coming to the conclusion that the pain I am feeling or have felt is ultimately the result of love. There’s something so very beautiful about carrying that with me.

Another way that we can view loss is through the idea that nothing and no one is truly gone. We carry people with us through our vocabularies, actions, behaviours and most obviously through our memories. There are so many things I say and do that have come from others. The stories that we tell about the memories we share help us recognise that loss is almost only something physical. People are so malleable that in reality, no one is ever fully lost or gone, they’re carried through the mosaic that makes each of us who we are. Each different part of us is made up of little tiles of personality — some of which are ours to give and some of which are ours to take.

The level of intertwinement of love and loss, shows us how important holding those we love close to us and how important it is to cherish those positive aspects as well as redefining the way that we view loss — in whichever form it takes.

Words by Scarlett Sheehan