Friday’s Reflection
LOSING SOMEONE SIGNIFICANT involves a loss to the body as well. Loss is a physical experience. The body has ways of knowing that seem to ignore the mind and heart. In the early years after my first wife died, I found myself becoming distressed in the springtime (near the anniversary of her death). My body would become restless and unsettled. . . . When we spend time telling the story of the loss, we are trying to cause the body to come to terms with the loss.
Loss reaches deep in the soul too. When our child dies, our soul is stripped of much of the comfort and security it had constructed for itself. The soul may have had a fundamental trust of the universe or God, but when a child is taken from us, the soul must fundamentally reorient itself. The world will never be as friendly as it was before. . . . To remember, to tell the story over and over, is the soul’s way of trying to re-understand and know itself in relation to the forces that hold life and threaten life.
It could be said that through remembering we come to “full body” knowing. When we tell of the one we have lost, we are integrating our body, mind, heart, and soul so that all of who we are fully experiences the truth of the loss.
- Lose, Love, Live
From page 62 of Lose, Love, Live: The Spiritual Gifts of Loss and Change, by Dan Moseley. Copyright © 2010 by Dan Moseley. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Upper Room Books. http://www.upperroom.org/bookstore/. Learn more about or purchase this book.
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