The further on we go in life, the more we encounter loss. Loss, we mistakenly believe, is a thing to be avoided. When it comes to mind, body and emotions, many of us have been taught since third grade to “hold it all together.” Impossible! How absurd! This would be like lifting a completed 1000 piece puzzle in your hands and transporting it across the room. Inevitably pieces fall out. If the project of life includes learning to love loss pieces, then I got a big teaching last month visiting my mother Susan, plagued by Alzheimer’s dementia, living in a “Memory Care Unit” of a retirement home, referred to by the army of nurse aides, OTs and PTs euphemistically as “Vista.” If you need a lesson on living loss, then spend days with a loved one in the throes of dementia. “Who is that?” mom asks on a FaceTime call with my brother Michael who lives in India. “Is he coming with us (for dinner)?” Being with my mom is like being on a Buddhist Retreat. As we walk round and round the institutional corridors of Vista, my mom, vanishing before my eyes, evokes in me a feeling of bodhicitta– loving kindness. And a joyful sorrow fills my heart.
In loss we are given a vision of a larger awareness. The vanishing—so full of gaps, distances and missing spaces– quickens spiritual awakening. When Shakyamuni Buddha, left the comfy confines of his family compound it was because his spiritual quest necessitated immediate contact with loss–poverty, deprivation, aging and death. He saw first hand into the nature of suffering. Loss then is a strange thing. It works like a guru, teaching us hard lessons in non-clinging.
The poet Elizabeth Bishop calls the practice of losing the “One Art” we must master (if you do not know the poem be sure to read below). Put loss into practice everyday! The very breath you are on now, your aching shoulder, the name of the thing you can’t remember, your eyesight, this day today. And “further faster”– your job, your house, the forest, the glaciers. The inevitability of loss gives way to growth and becoming. Most of all, loss gives us a glimpse into the vastness, into the one reality behind this imagined world. As with a fishing net, this life is full of holes. Find the gaps, pass through the spaces in the net. By learning to love loss we slip into the spirit’s own home.
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Elizabeth Bishop
