I to myself am lost

when we lose someone and we lose ourself, a reflection on grief and loss

‘I am utterly bereft without you and its as if I put the loss outside of myself. But the truth is that you were never only out there, what we call a self, my self, was formed in your company and was held in shape by our connection, when you left, that holding left too. I miss you so much and it is like I have become a stranger to myself’.

The philosopher Judith Butler said in grief we discover we were never the sealed, self-owning creatures we imagined ourselves to be. Our attachments undo us, and to lose someone we love is to find a part of us gone with them. In Gestalt therapy we define the self not as a fixed thing rather an event that keeps happening at the boundary, that edge meeting point between ourselves, the other and the world. Take away that person we were most in contact with and the boundary is redrawn without our consent. This is how the grief of loss can unmoor us so completely. Its as if the very ground tilts away and the familiar becomes foreign, I reach for who I was and find the very reaching itself has changed.

In her book When Things Fall Apart, Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön talks about groundlessness. Her counsel is to stay on that brink and not scramble to fix it, to remain in the tender, off-centre state where nothing resolves. The first of the Buddha's truths is that we suffer, and the reason we suffer is that we cling to things staying as they are in a world where nothing ever does. Impermanence is simply the fundamental reality of our existence, the condition that everything is made of, always arriving and always leaving. Suffering and impermanence are two of the three Buddhist marks of existence, along with the absence of any fixed, separate self. In loss these marks come into sharp focus, the order of things shows its hand and the shock of grief is partly the shock at having believed, against all the evidence, that these truths would somehow not apply to us.

There is a Tibetan phrase Chödrön quotes in her book, 'ye tang che', which means something like utterly worn out, or completely fed up. For her this exhaustion is a beginning rather than a defeat, it is the moment you give up the hope that there is somewhere more secure, some arrangement that will hold, the moment you stop bracing against reality and meet the loss as it is. This is true hopelessness, the tender acceptance that no one is coming to fix it. And in Alfred Bessier’s paradoxical theory of change, this complete acceptance of where we are at the brink is the first step towards change actually being possible.

Grief, at least in the Western context, seems to have moved away from trying to loosen the hold on what we cannot keep towards the idea of continuing bonds with relationships not ending so much as changing form. Freud, who wrote a foundational description of mourning as the slow withdrawal of love from someone gone, experienced something different in his own experience of grief. Years after his daughter died he told a friend that the gap a loss leaves stays a gap, that we never fill it and should not wish to, because that ache is the last shape the love can take.

That feels closer to my experience of loss rather than the established idea of grief as something that unfolds in stages and milestones towards acceptance, as though the one we lost was a debt to be cleared. In Gestalt we would call this unfinished business; an experience that draws energy for completion and when it doesn't get it keeps pressing at us until it does. Grief might be the unfinished business that we will never finish, and perhaps part of the suffering we feel comes from being told it should.

I find solace in the Buddhist practice of 'tonglen' where we breathe the pain in rather than push it away, and when we breathe out, we breathe out ease for everyone who is suffering in the world. When our own grief is too big to hold, the practice is to widen it, to breathe on behalf of everyone alive who has lost someone at that same moment, the whole unseen company of the bereaved. It feels almost impossible to do when we are in such acute pain. Yet the thing that has undone us is the thing that has undone everyone who ever loved, and there is comfort, cold comfort in this human fellowship of loss.

So I can accept both the Buddhist view and Freud’s, impermanence is real, the person is not coming back and yet the absence keeps its shape. It does not close, and in fact the work to do is not to close it at all but rather to grow larger around it, until the absence sits in the middle of a wider life. I do not want it healed, to heal it cleanly would be to lose them a second time, and I do not want that.

Still I have to get through the night so there is the breath. I breathe the pain in, the whole weight of it and breathe out towards the person, towards the bare facts of their being gone. This fixes nothing, the absence is exactly the same and what loosens, if anything loosens, is the bracing. I stop holding my breath against the loss and let it move through me, this seems like a smaller and more possible thing than acceptance, and does not asks me to be at peace with any of my experience.

Somewhere tonight a great many people are awake with an absence of the same shape, it reminds me that the thing crushing me now is the most ordinary thing there is, merely a tax on having loved at all. So I breathe it in for them too and breathe something back, and that might be enough to get me to the morning.

References
Title quote from Goethe, 'Marienbader Elegie', ich bin mir selbst verloren
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence ( 2004)
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1997)
Sigmund Freud, 'Mourning and Melancholia' (1917)