Landscape of Loss

I lost my mother in July. Although really I lost her long before. She had Lewy Body dementia. For years she quietly disappeared. But not completely. She knew who she was, who we were, so it was hard to pinpoint the disappearance. Only when she died did it become clear and absolute. Yet the disappearance after only seemed in the slightest bit different than that before. As sad as I was to lose her, the question "Will I go visit mom today?" - which had loomed large at all times - vanished. I could breathe. In December I lost my dog. He had been living with cancer for a year. Treatments had been tried and failed. In that year, the questions were always there. A year of waiting for him to die, never knowing when. Maybe even worse, a year knowing that no longer having a dog would bring freedom alongside the loss. From a world dominated by anxieties about visiting my mother and worrying about when our dog would die and how everyone would handle it, I suddenly felt alone. Alone time - once rare and precious - suddenly became quiet and cold. The loss sneaks up on you. You can see it coming, but are helpless to change it. You put on a Band-Aid here and there, but you know the ultimate outcome. And so, perhaps, you even want it to come so the waiting, anxiety, pressure to do more, will go away. But when it happens, it is complete. Suddenly there is no going back. I think climate change is a little like that. We don't know how fast it's coming. We try to put on Band-Aids. Yet those measures feel small and futile. We know the outcome is fixed and inevitable. The Earth will no longer support human life as we know it. In this generation? The next? Will anxiety be ever-present, hanging over and behind everything? How do you process that kind of loss, move forward, build, grow, try to fix things, when you always see that end right in front of you? No end is actually final, fixed, until it is. Can you turn that though into genuine hope? How do you silence the inevitable loss? So that instead of looking back and saying I wish I had enjoyed them more when they were here, instead of always waiting for the end, you are able to say you got joy and pleasure in the moment from the precious thing that had not yet been lost. A loss that is sudden, unforeseen, is devastating, without time to prepare, process, adjust. But a loss that is slow, but inevitable, is insidious. It gobbles up the present in the process. It makes that loss real sooner, long before it actually happens.