Love’s Dynamic

Save and print pages written to January 1, 2008:  Word  PDF

It is a rare person who has not experienced the devastation of losing someone they love. Whether that loss is through death, divorced parents or the rejection of a love partner, the experience scorches the core of our being, leaving a hole that is excruciating in its slowness to close and sometimes not closing at all, remaining an open, gaping wound.

Losing someone you love is life’s most potent tool for providing us with opportunities to grow as human beings. The choices we make in times of great sorrow shape us and act as a blueprint for what we become. An outstanding example of this premise is Candy Lightner who lost her daughter when she was killed by a drunk driver. Her response was to ‘get mad’. The result was the creation of “Mothers Against Drunk Drivers” (MADD), a world-wide organization that has greatly influenced how society thinks about drinking and driving. Because of the actions of this one woman in a time of great sorrow, laws in a number of countries have been changed to make penalties for drinking and driving tougher.

Sadly, the choice of many people is to carve the landscape of their soul with bitterness and regret. For others, the hurt is so all-consuming that it seems like the only rational choice is to put up walls so high and so thick that no-one can ever breach them again. These choices are sad because they result in a diminished capacity to love, which in turn diminishes us as a human.

That is not to say it is easy to get through the pain and love again. It’s not. Sometimes it takes years and even then it takes making a conscious decision to let love happen; that it is better to love again, even for just a moment in time, than to live life without love in it.

Over the span of my own life I have experienced many losses. Death has claimed both my parents, two sisters and a well-loved friend. I have known the sorrow of losing a love-mate more than once. And then there is the love that is lost to what can only be described as circumstances. For me that has been friends, all too few in number, moving away and losing touch; being taken away from foster families I had come to love; the loss of a pet.

Each time love is lost, for whatever reason, it has a different effect and impact on our lives. When death arrives as an unexpected visitor we are consumed with the ‘why’ and our own mortality. The sorrow felt can be mixed with bitter tears of regret that we could have loved more; been angry less often; been more understanding. The shards of a shattered love cut deep and can be many things – anger, the pain of rejection, even hatred.

Every circumstance of love lost has one thing in common. It is the absence of the unique connection that comes with loving and being loved. It is that which we miss with longing and sorrow.

Love Lost