Life’s little moods

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. -Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet (1792-1822)

 

And loss is loss, be it a day, a month, a year, a decade or even 24 years.

February 2, 2000 was one of those days, my children lost their father, I my husband.

And if the tragedy of the loss has diminished the remembered pain survives.

 

Putting away grief – and the Christmas tree – are some of the hardest things to do.

Today I did both.

Highlight’s Antonyms

If I can look back over many highlights in my life

• Learning to read
• Getting my first library card
• Having a complete and stable group of friends in both school and church
• Getting to move to Hawaii for three years
• Going to boarding school
• Doing two of my university years in France
• Returning to Switzerland
• Meeting and marrying my husband
• The birth of my two sons
• Surviving two bouts of cancer
• Traveling to many wonderful spots on this earth (so many that the list would take up too much space here)

Those same highlights also had their antonyms in the many losses along the way.

Family alone:

• My mother-in-law in 1975
• My favorite aunt (and who’s name I share) in 1980
• The youngest German brother-in-law, 1992
• My father in 1998
• My husband in 2000
• The oldest German brother-in-law in 2001
• My sister-in-law’s father, 2004
• My sister’s father-in-law 2006
• My mother in 2009
• My sister-in-law’s mother in 2009
• My little sister in 2012
• And those for whom I don’t remember the year: my mother’s oldest sister; my father’s two sisters, brother; my cousins, a favorite German aunt and uncle

If I list them it is because they still live on in the hearts and thoughts of those who loved them.

Today in particular we remember my husband – the words that he wrote upon the death of his mother “Liebe ist Zeitlos” became our motto for those who left us thereafter.

Love is indeed timeless, an entity that continues with or without the object of that love. If we have and share love with many in our lifetimes, there is perhaps no other love as great as that we claim for the spouse: that person that we choose to share our lives with, our strengths as well as our weaknesses, for a time walking side-by-side. No matter the length of time, no matter the outcome (divorce or death), the love that made us willing to compromise with another human being in order to be at their side, the love that we nurtured for that period of precious time remains.

Loss and change or change and loss

Whichever way one writes it, it doesn’t really make much difference when one is speaking of a negative event.  However, point of perception, should one speak of weight loss and change being buying new clothes to go with the new body, it would be totally positive and better written in the first manner.

My thoughts this morning are not quite so positive and the change and loss of which I write currently are not pleasant. Much has been written throughout millenniums about loss and I certainly couldn’t add anything new, however, viewed from one’s own perspective, loss is always new, always personal, always pertinent to oneself. It doesn’t matter that others have been there, that the platitudes of “if one door shuts, another opens”, the beauty of “better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all”.

Interestingly enough the word loss itself seems to have only come into use in the 13^th/14^th century: Wiktionary states: “Etymology
Old English has los "loss, destruction," from a Proto-Germanic root *lausam- (see lose), but the modern word probably evolved in the 14th century from lost, the original past participle of lose, itself from Old English losian "be lost, perish," from los "destruction, loss", from a Proto-Germanic root *lausa (compare O.N. los "the breaking up of an army"), from Proto-Indo-Eeuopean base *leu- "to loosen, divide, cut apart, untie, separate"

Were ancient philosophers unacquainted with the notion? That would be hard to believe – they perhaps just didn’t use the word, but rather spoke of change instead. “If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.”
― Socrates

My conclusion: sometimes change and loss are unpleasant enough to merit floundering a bit in their negativity; to not put a happy spin on it, nor to justify the better things that may come as a result. Sometimes, loss is just that: an absence of something or someone that devastates. Time enough to pick oneself up and adjust to the change: first weep, wail and wallow!