Editor's Note
Living with Loss
Just when you think it has died, grief rises phoenix-like from its ashes and captures you.
There is something of mourning in the fall. Maybe it’s the changing season—glorious color fading to gray sticks against a gray sky, shrinking days with commutes to work and home in the dark, north winds as harbingers of the deep freeze ahead. Maybe it’s the looming completion of another year and the realization of time passed and diminishing time ahead. Or maybe it’s the losses that have occurred in our family, mostly in the fall—the loss of loved ones with the death of three parents, and the loss of health with my wife’s diagnosis of breast cancer three years ago and recurrent Hodgkin’s disease in my daughter-in-law. I have grown wary of the fall and the recurrent grief that sometimes wriggles its way into my life during this season.
But that’s the way grief is. It never quite leaves you alone. It’s born with the loss and then continues to live, sometimes loud and boisterous with crying or raging, sometimes dark and soft with bittersweet contemplation, and sometimes covert and sneaky, lying just below the surface. Just when you think it has died, grief rises phoenix-like from its ashes and captures you.
Anybody who has lost someone or something can grieve. Young children can grieve. People can grieve before the lost is lost. Watching the slow decline of a loved one with cancer or dementia or the concatenation of illness that seems to afflict more and more of our aging population starts the grieving process almost before the person leaves. In my practice, I have seen families suffer through the progression from home to apartment to assisted living to nursing home, the steady march of eroding debility with recurrent falls, receding memory, and lost independence. It becomes a slow vigil, sometimes lasting years, watching the person you knew fade and deteriorate, often becoming a different person. Nobody becomes resistant to grief. It is part of being human.
Like its relatives complicated grief and depression, grief is a medical problem. It can make people sick; it interferes with their lives; it mimics other diseases. But because grief has so many faces, it can be hard to spot in patients. They may not even mention their loss; but buried in the insomnia, the nausea, the weight loss, or the fatigue lies grief in its most destructive guise, when the person doesn’t acknowledge that it’s there. It will never become comfortable; but pull it out in the air, talk about it, tie it to the loss, and it becomes workable.
“Working through grief” is a bit of a cliché, but it does get at one of the truths about grief. Through its life, it changes, and the relationship between the griever and the grieved changes. Reworking memories and revisiting events generates new insights and understanding about who the lost one was and what he or she meant to you. Grief can be revelation and renewal.
Fall is really about renewal, part of a cycle that will one day return us to lengthening days, buds and green, and warm spring winds. The past year will always be past, but the new one holds possibilities. The lost will always be lost, but we still love them and engage them. And lost health can be re-won, and that is reason enough for joy and celebration—even in autumn.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief
Dr. Meyer can be reached at cmeyer1@fairview.org