My recent loss of my middle child Jennifer has inspired me to have more reflection time, really stopping what I've been doing and truly asking myself better questions.
Am I being congruent with my core beliefs and my highest values? Am I attaching strings? Am I putting conditions on my relationships? Am I being genuine and real? I'm taking inventory of what matters to me and being brutally honest with myself.
Jen was special. To me and to many, many people. This loss is hard to deal with, as those of you who have experienced loss know. So many of us, as we have more and more birthdays, see more and more loss of loved ones. And we lose the world we knew when we were young, even as we continue to live lives and have experiences and move toward the goals we set for ourselves. This is the paradox of getting older: you gain so much as you become an adult and at the same time, you experience loss of those things, even as more and more comes into your life. It's what gives life on earth its specific taste: bittersweet.
And that demands something of us. We need, like connoisseurs, to learn to appreciate the way the bitter and sweet come together to make life what it is. Everything beautiful and wonderful will change, and in that way cease to be. We will lose beliefs, jobs, and people that not only bring us joy, but bring us purpose, and sometimes define who we are, as our children define us as parents. We aren't parents in the abstract, we are parents of the children we have.
So while I'm still grieving and will always be, another compartment of my mind—the one that is trained after so many years of being intentional about my life—is doing its work and taking this painful material and trying to turn it into fuel for a paradigm shift. My life won't ever be the same now, and while the part that loves wants to deny the loss, seek blame, and be angry as a means of denying it, the part that must go on, the part that makes meaning so I can go on, has opened up an incredible opportunity to take myself to a whole new level of understanding and joy, and maybe wisdom. And it's helping me process my grief into meaning, which is a huge, painful task that I can't hesitate to start.
As I share some of my thinking while doing this work, I'll share some of my notes on my specific process. One key insight I'm having is that some of my "favorite words," those key words I use in my development work, look different to me now, and exploring this is where I'm starting.
I love the word Freedom, and for over 20 years I've had the morning question: "How can I enjoy even more freedom today and help others do the same?"
I've just realized I need and want to change that to: "What action can I take today to take advantage of the freedom I've already achieved to make a difference?"
I need to inventory my freedoms, embrace them, share them, and be more purposeful with my life. I like to think of myself as having done a good job with my life so far, creating amazing relationships and opportunities for others and myself, and my family.
But I don't think I've accomplished this to the extent that feels significant enough in light of such a significant loss. Sometimes you don't get perspective on how much things mean until something that means so much is taken away.
Tony Robbins has an old quote saying "this may suck, but if you could find something good out of it, what would it be?" The deeper meaning of this speaks to the instinct we all have, the habit of mind that is powerful in all of us to, as Freud said, undo. We first react to things we don't like or that challenge us or that hurt us by mentally trying to undo it, saying, "No. No. This is not happening, isn't real, or isn't important." But this mental undoing is what isn't real. There's no undoing some things. By pretending you can, you only hurt yourself further, and hurt others the more you insist that you can.
There's no undoing the loss of someone you love. There's no way to blame or deny or rage or think it into being something other than a loss of someone irreplaceable. But these losses reveal so much. They reveal the significance and weight and life-changing power of being a parent, of raising a child, of building a family, and building relationships with our children as adults. In the wake of such a loss we have a new perception of how willing we were, time and time again, to overcome anything that made doing these things difficult, of why we were so willing. Of why we are still willing. And that we are, ultimately, heartbroken because of the very fact that we would do anything to overcome it, like every other challenge before. But we can't.
The love we share makes our lives big. Loss shows us just how big, in the shape of the absence of the loved ones we lose. I am not being philosophical; I am trying to come to terms so I can understand it and make meaning for myself, and, as I always do, learn by sharing with others, especially those of you who know who I am talking about. The words aren’t the whole story. But they’re a necessary part for someone like me, who needs to be able to talk about things.
There is so much energy still here from Jen. From me to her, from her to me, and all of that multiplied many, many times by the relationship we had and the many other relationships we were connected to and through in our family, our friends, and so many others.
As I take everything that's happened—the rollercoaster that has ended with the loss of our Jen—and tell myself a story I can live with, the part I am writing now starts with honoring the last lesson she had for me by looking at how I will live the rest of my life. It's a powerful force that compels me.
Dave