Coping with life
(A grief survival guide)
Everything in life is temporary and certain to change. Babies grow and gradually become adults that mature, get old, and eventually die. I love you, you’re perfect, now change, Off-Broadway’s second longest running musical is about the challenges everyone faces while going about the seemingly ordinary business of living their lives and coping as best they can with change.
Life’s challenges come in infinite varieties. For instance, a legendary diner’s devoted followers must adjust to its closing when the eighty-nine-year old owner dies. Retires have to face the music of finding new lives after leaving their work-oriented routines. And of course there are spectacular life-altering events like accidents and illnesses, divorce and the deaths of loved ones.
We all have the same types of responses to change, but everyone is uniquely, personally affected.
Everyone begins their day with a fantasy-plan based on their goals and lifestyle. My friend Dennis is an eccentric, elderly bachelor with graduate degrees who retired from a successful career. For years he has spent every morning sipping coffee and sitting at a small table just inside a popular mall book store/coffee shop, watching people coming in, going out, and passing by the door. Occasionally I or someone from the band drops in to visit with him. Other than Monday’s band practice, the coffee shop may be his sole social experience.
Suppose one day he comes to the door and finds it permanently closed, his routine abruptly ended. I imagine he would be shocked and angry and feel sad and lonely. He would be confused about what to do that day and every morning thereafter. While there are many places to sit and have coffee, there’s none that he knows of at the moment.
Maybe the place wasn’t perfect. It’s a long drive from home. Parking was sometimes a problem. One employee seemed suspicious of him and another kept walking by every few minutes asking if he wanted more coffee. But it suited him.
He’ll grieve his loss. But to do so healthfully he will need to spend time fully experiencing his pain without trying to find a short cut around it. He will have flashbacks of anger and sadness that pop up periodically and unexpectedly. Eventually, they will happen less often and be less intense. The surest way out of grieving is going through it.
In due time, recovery from loss requires courage to discover what, exactly, was forever lost. To many, a coffee shop is just a coffee shop. But, with no close relatives and living alone in the house his parents built seventy years ago, it would be foolish to estimate the full meaning of the loss to him. The loss of one significant attachment in life threatens all other significant attachments, like his relationships with fellow band members.
To the extent that he understands and quarantines his loss, it’s removed from his focused attention. Then he can begin to rebalance his life and integrate the loss into his life’s story. He will also have new possibilities for discovering a life that wouldn’t have been possible until he’d experienced and recovered from the loss.
Life’s changes present a series of opportunities for personal transformation.
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