Varieties of Loss, Finding My Religion

This morning, I woke to NPR’s Speaking of Faith and these words, “Loss is not just catastrophic death, there are many different kinds of losses in our lives all the time. There’s this kind of stunning idea…that the way we deal with those losses large and small can really help or get in the way of how we live the rest of our lives—with what we have, not just with what we’ve lost.”

In my early morning fogginess, my hand floated over and clicked off the clock radio. My dreams drifted in a cloud of confusion with a ping of clarity coming at their center: yes, of course there are varieties of loss. Waking this morning, I felt as though I was flipping a page on an old chapter called Grief, and putting words to the emotions that have woven darkness over my story for the last decade.

My early twenties were marked by death coming not in its hackneyed triplicate but in a quintuple frame. Childhood friends, family members, a college friend all died within two year’s time. When an uncle died I had a physical reaction, lying awake with chills as I imagined him buried in his coffin. I pictured my friends living and willed myself to eliminate all thought of their passing.

As devastating as those losses were, the shape of my grief was what tortured me. I had once been an extremely faithful person, one set on becoming a minister, but religion got in the way of spirituality for me, as I was convinced that belief could only mean one brand of Christianity. When that failed me (after I studied the Bible and realized how ludicrous my old ideas had been), the linchpin of my belief system fell away. I was unsure how to operate in the world, but only knew that at my previous point of faith there was a vacuum. There are reasons why we deem it “losing God” or “losing religion.” As deeply as I was affected by the physical loss of the people I loved, when the core of my reality was swept away, I reacted as many grieving people do—I was furious.

Years went by as I rolled my eyes at faithful people I knew. They were either idiots or would be burned by religion eventually. A part of me was jealous. I wished I could still believe that some part of my lost loved ones lived on, but I couldn’t, and without that spiritual comfort, I became even more deeply enraged at the god who didn’t exist and couldn’t provide solace.

I mourned multiple forms of death and wasted years burning with ire. Through a variety of genetic circumstance, my health also deteriorated, and with that, I began to believe that dreams too were chimera, losable things, breakable trusts.

What these multiple layers of loss have meant is that my life’s philosophy became, in part, dictated by loss. Where once god and Jesus and a host of theological prescriptions nailed me to a belief system, now I saw only impermanence. When death and loss were my most common considerations, that impermanence terrorized me, and I found life too brief, too cruel and far too unpredictable.

But as grief so often unwinds, as time passed, I discovered that the hurt from these losses was alleviating. There’s a cliché about waking up one morning and realizing you feel better, and this morning I did—and noticed I have for quite a while.

The void in my belief system has been filled, and a sense of impermanence holds reign, but it’s no longer just a description about death and suffering. Life and growth are also factors that make our small human lives unpredictable. For years I mourned the loss of doctrine that named a single way of being. Instead I found life (and death) to be a maddening swirl, a chaos that takes away, but also gives. I found a religiosity of messiness, and there, I cannot make sense of life’s many losses, but I can accept them—and in that, find a means for hope.