When night is like day
And over slow footpaths,
Dense with golden dreams,
Lulling breezes drift.
The abandoned place is dense with the presence of the absent ones who have walked there. Another region of absence is the absence of what is yet to come.
The Absence of the Future
There is also a whole region of the absent which embraces not the vanished, but that which has not yet arrived. On the pathway of time, the individual is always somehow in the middle. There are events, persons, thoughts, and novelties ahead that have not yet arrived. This is the territory of the unknown. We are always reaching forward with open gestures into the future. Much of our thinking endeavours to invite the unknown to disclose itself. This is especially true of questions. The question is the place where the unknown becomes articulate and active in us. The question is impatient with the unrevealed. It reaches forward to open doors in the unknown. The question attempts to persuade absence to yield its concealed presences. All perception works at this threshold. Unknown to ourselves we are always unveiling new worlds that lie barely out of reach. This is where the imagination is fully creative. All language, thought, creativity, prayer, and action live out of that fissure between word and thing, longing and fulfilment, subject and object.
There are invisible furrows of absence everywhere.
Towards a Philosophy of Loss
Life is rich and generous in her gifts to us. We receive much more than we know. Frequently life also takes from us. Loss is always affecting us.
A current of loss flows through your life like the tide that returns eternally to rinse away another wafer of stone from the shoreline.
You know the sore edges in your heart where loss has taken from you. You stand now on the stepping stone of the present moment. In a minute it will be gone, never to return. With each breath you are losing time. Absence is the longing for something that is gone. Loss is the hole that it leaves. The sense of loss confers a great poignancy on your longing. Each life has its own different catalogue. Some people are called to endure wounds of loss that are devastating. How they survive is difficult to understand. Each of us in our own way will be called at different times to make its sore acquaintance. From this angle, life is a growth in the art of loss. Eventually, we learn to enter absolute loss at death. In Conamara, when someone is dying, they often say “Tá sí ar a cailleadh,” i.e., She is dying—literally, “She is in her losing.”
In a certain sense, there can be no true belonging without the embrace of loss. Belonging can never be a fixed thing. It is always quietly changing. At its core, belonging is growth. When belonging is alive, it always brings new transitions. The old shelter collapses; we lose what it held; now we have to cross over into the beginnings of a new shelter of belonging that only gathers itself slowly around us. To be honest and generous in belonging to the awkward and unpredictable transition is very difficult. This happens often in friendship and love. Your relationship may be changing or ending. Often the temptation is to suppress this, or avoid it or cut it off in one brutal, undiscussed stroke. If you do this, you will not belong to the changing, and you will find yourself an intruder on the emerging new ground. You will not be honourably able to rest in the new belonging because you did not observe the dignity of painfully earning your passage. Loss always has much to teach us; its voice whispers that the shelter just lost was too small for our new souls. But it remains hard to belong generously to the rhythm of loss.
The beauty of loss is the room it makes for something new. If everything that came to us were to stay, we would be dead in a day from mental obesity. The constant flow of loss allows us to experience and enjoy new things. It makes vital clearance in the soul. Loss is the sister of discovery; it is vital to openness; though it certainly brings pain. There are some areas of loss in your life which you may never get over. There are some things you lose and, after the pain settles, you begin to see that they were never yours in the first place. As the proverb says: What you never had you never lost.
Loss qualifies our whole desire to have and to possess. It is startling that you cannot really hold on to anything. Despite its intensity, the word “mine” can only have a temporary and partial reference. Ironically, sometimes when we desperately hold on to something or someone, it is almost as if we secretly believe that we are going to lose them. Holding on desperately cannot in any way guarantee belonging. The probability is that it will in some strange way only hasten loss. True belonging has a trust and ease; it is not driven by desperation to lose yourself in it or the fear that you will lose it.
The loneliest wave of loss is the one that carries a loved one away towards death.
Grief: Longing for the Lost One
As a child you think death is so strange. You anticipate that when it comes, it will be accompanied by major drama. Yet so often death arrives with uncanny quiet. It steals into a room and leaves an awful silence. A loved one is gone. The first time that death takes someone close to you, it breaks your innocence and your natural trust in life. It is strange to lose someone to death. The shock should paralyse you, but the disturbing quiet somehow makes everything sufficiently unreal, and the force of the loss is dissipated. Unlikely as it may sound, though death has indeed occurred and you were there, you do not truly know yet that your friend has died. You go through the funeral days, their drama and sympathy buoyed up by the certainty and shelter of rhythm which this whole ritual provides. It is only later, when the new silence gathers around your life, that you realize your awful loss. You have been thrown out of the shelter of a belonging where your heart was at home.
The time of grief is awkward, edgy, and lonesome. At first, you feel that it is totally unreal. With the belonging severed, you feel numbed. When you love someone, you are no longer single. You are more than yourself. It is as if many of your nerve lines now extend outside your body towards the beloved, and theirs reach towards you. You have made living bridges to each other and changed the normal distance that usually separates us. When you lose someone, you lose a part of yourself that you loved, because when you love, it is the part of you that you love most that always loves the other.
Grief is at its most acute at death. There is also a whole unacknowledged grief that accompanies the breakup of a relationship. This indeed can often be worse than death, at least initially, because the person is still around and possibly with someone else. The other is cut off from you.
Grief is the experience of finding yourself standing alone in the vacant space with all this torn emotional tissue protruding. In the rhythm of grieving, you learn to gather your given heart back to yourself again. This sore gathering takes time. You need great patience with your slow heart. It takes the heart a long time to unlearn and transfer its old affections. This is a time when you have to swim against the tide of your life. It seems for a while that you are advancing, then the desolation and confusion pull you down, and when you surface again, you seem to be even further from the shore. It is slow making your way back on your own. You feel so many conflicting things. You are angry one minute; the next moment you are just so sad. After a death there are people around you, yet you feel utterly isolated: no one else has the foggiest notion of your loss. No one had what you had, therefore, no one else had lost it. Yet when friends try gently to accompany you, you find yourself pulling back from them, too. In a remarkable collection of modern elegies to mourn the loss of his wife, the Scottish poet Douglas Dunn ends his poem “The Clear Day” with this verse: