A fresh perspective on living with loss

Last week marked a sad milestone for me – I’m a year down the line from losing my dear Mum.

They say that “time’s a great healer” but personally I don’t think that the loss of a significant person in your life is something that you ever really get over. Certainly not if you’ve been with someone for over 60 years as is the case for my Dad.

I heard someone recently describe the feeling of the loss of a loved one as being like walking down a familiar street and then one day one of large buildings on the street isn’t there anymore. You do a double take and stand looking in disbelief at the space where the building was – it’s impossible to process because while logically you know it’s true, every part of your being is fighting against it, confused.

The loss of a loved one – or anything significant in your life for that matter – a job, a way of life, an identity - brings a mess of challenging emotions.

As I’ve been working through my own grief I’ve looked at some well-known resources – things like the Kubler-Ross model (stages of grief: denial – anger – bargaining – depression - acceptance – though not necessarily in that order) a theory that that was used initially in the world of bereavement counselling which has been adopted by organisations as a tool to understand responses to loss and reactions to change.

But during this past year what I’ve come to believe is that we don’t “get over” or move on from loss but rather we begin to adapt to our new circumstances – to readjust to life without that person (or thing) in it. The feeling of loss is still there but gradually over time other things also come into your new reality – there is still a gap on the street where the building was but now there might be a few trees in the space or you begin to notice the view through the gap in the houses.

It turns out that there is actually a model called the “Grow around Grief” (Dr Lois Tonkin 1996) that speaks to this exact experience – a model that acknowledges that the grief or loss doesn’t feel smaller as time goes on, but that life slowly feels bigger, expanding around the loss. You do new things in different ways, meet new people and have new experiences. You learn to live with loss, your life grows with, and around it.

It might sound a little trite to say as Robert Frost did “In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on.” But life does go on – and as human beings we have remarkable ability to adapt – to evolve and to grow. And this makes me feel hopeful.