Betty Arrigotti

Aging Through Losses

“… how happy others are because of you.” What a wonderful measure for our lives.

This week we ponder the Losses that life requires, and the growth those losses bring. We look back at earlier stages and can see the wisdom in growing. Let’s hold, in our current stage, to the belief that there is wisdom in letting go.

Those of you who’ve read my posts over the years know I’m very impressed by the wisdom of Judith Viorst. How can we talk about Aging with Grace without looking at the losses aging entails? In her book, Necessary Losses, Viorst discusses the “loves, illusions, dependencies, and impossible expectations that all of us have to give up in order to grow.”

She writes:

In the course of our life we leave and are left and let go of much that we love. Losing is the price we pay for living. It is also the source of much of our growth and gain. Making our way from birth to death, we also have to make our way through the pain of giving up and giving up and giving up some portion of what we cherish.

We have to deal with our necessary losses.

We should understand how these losses are linked to our gains.

There is plenty we must give up in order to grow. For we cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.

Our life or growth could be seen as a progression of letting go, followed by the gain a new stage brings:

Childhood’s End – We give up a belief that we can be kept safe and receive instead the freedom and responsibility to make our own choices. We accept reality, and with it accept that we don’t get special treatment, absolute control, compensation for past loss, or perfect companions. We don’t blame our current lives on our childhood.

The Married State – We learn that no person can meet all our expectations all of the time, nor can some expectations ever be met. Our spouse can’t make us be happy, heal all our hurts from the past, or fill all our needs. Those unfulfilled expectations are necessary losses in order to truly love our less-than-perfect spouses.

Letting Children Go – In parenting we fear our imperfect love will harm our children, or we will fail to keep them safe. Facing our fallibility as parents is another of our necessary losses. We must let our children become steadily more independent and let go of them and our dreams for them.

The Loss of Youth – Time will repeatedly force us to relinquish our self-image and move on. We leave youth and health behind. We lose abilities and strengths. We let go of dreams as we realize we’ll never accomplish them all. Yet we gain experience, inner depth, acceptance of others, patience, and self-control. We move from body preoccupation to body transcendence. We move from identifying ourselves by what we do or who we parent to who we are. We can become an integrated whole, accepting our weaknesses along with our strengths.

The Loss of our Loved Ones – Mourning is the process of adapting to the losses in our lives. We travel through and revisit stages of numbness, denial, intense emotional pain, bargaining, anger, guilt, and idealizing whom or what we lost. But as we find our way through the mourning and learn to let go of our pain, we can come to acceptance. (We will take a closer look at grief next week.)

We live enriched lives, knowing that each day is vital. We make the most of the present to find a way to leave a legacy to the world for the future.

“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” Philippians 3:8-9

Being alive means we will suffer loss. But the loss will open us to new possibilities. Jesus lost his life, but by doing so, regained for us the Kingdom of God. He rose to new life so that we will, too. In that life, there will be no loss.