What Remains After Loss
When my father died more than forty-five years ago, I was not prepared for the loss.
Not for the stillness after the machines were turned off. Not for the sound of the dirt falling on the casket. Not for the hollow ache of realizing I would never again hear his laugh or feel his big, reassuring hug when I came to visit.
His illness had lasted nine months—long enough, you would think, for my mind to catch up to what my heart already knew.
I had done much of his caregiving near the end, trying to make peace with what was coming. But when it was over, I wasn’t at peace at all. I was lost. And angry.
As a single mother, I didn’t know how to raise two boys without his counsel. My compass was gone. I felt totally alone.
In those first months, I moved through life as if on autopilot—doing the next thing, checking off the necessary tasks—but the shape of my world had changed.
It was my first real lesson in what happens after a significant loss: the quiet, disorienting space between what was and whatever comes next.
I didn’t have words for it then, but looking back, that’s when I began to understand how fragile our inner balance can be, and how slowly we find our way to steady ground again.
The Shape of Loss
Over the years, I’ve come to see that every loss carries a trace of that first one. It isn’t something we ever master. We learn to live with it.
When we’re young, loss feels like a single event—something that happens, and then life resumes. But as we grow older, loss becomes a kind of landscape we live within. People move away, or they pass on. Our bodies shift, our memories blur, and familiar routines begin to change shape.
What surprises me most is how ordinary it all becomes, how we can go about our days—shopping, making appointments, watering the plants—while carrying the invisible weight of so many absences.
We adapt, because that’s what we do. But sometimes, late at night or while folding laundry, we feel the undercurrent again—the ache that reminds us we are still adjusting, still learning how to live with what’s been taken and what remains.
And maybe that’s part of what it means to age well: not to avoid the ache, but to make a kind of peace with it, without sentimentality.
The Myth of Bouncing Back
People like to say, “You’re strong—you’ve been through so much,” as if resilience were a medal you earn and then keep forever. I know they mean it kindly. But strength isn’t something I can summon on command, and it certainly doesn’t erase the ache.
When I was young, I believed in “bouncing back.” Something went wrong; you fixed it. Someone died, you grieved, and then you got on with life.
I thought that was how healing worked—like a rubber band snapping back into shape. But later I learned that real healing isn’t about returning to what was.
It’s about learning to live inside what’s new.
After any loss—of a parent, a child, a partner, a career, or our own physical abilities—there’s a season when the old rhythms no longer fit. We can’t just will ourselves to be who we were before. And maybe we shouldn’t.
There’s courage in not bouncing at all—in letting the ground under us settle, in admitting we don’t yet know who we’re becoming. It’s not a weakness. It’s wisdom earned from living long enough to understand that growth often begins where “getting over it” ends.
When the Tide Slips Out
Years after my father’s death, I felt a familiar unease when I unexpectedly retired from ministry.
The setting was different, but the feeling was the same—a sense of standing still while the world kept moving.
No one prepared me for the quiet that followed.
After the sermons, committee meetings, and hospital visits ended. After I packed away my robes for the last time.
After my status changed to “retired.” (And before I learned that ‘clergy never really retire!’)
I thought I’d rest, recoup my health, and begin again—but that isn’t what it felt like.
It was more like drifting in a familiar harbor after the tide slipped out.
The water still shimmered, but my boat sat heavy, grounded for the moment.
There was a strange stillness to my retirement—part peace, part loss.
I moved through my days—appointments, errands, some rehab, and dinners with my grandchildren.
I tried to stay “busy.” But beneath it all, a quieter question rose: What now?
It’s the same question that surfaces after any transition, no matter our age.
The roles that once defined us fall away, and what remains is something raw and unfamiliar.
We aren’t starting over exactly; we’re being asked to live differently, without the scaffolding of identity we once leaned on.
And yet, somewhere in that emptiness is room for new life to take shape.
Learning to Live in the Quiet
In time, I began to notice that the quiet I feared was not empty.
At first, it felt like a loss of direction—no schedule, no audience, no urgent need for my voice.
But gradually, I began to hear something else beneath the silence: a steadier rhythm, slower but more alive.
The days found their own shape. Mornings developed a routine that I keep to this day.
As I watch dawn appear through the blinds, I read something nourishing, write down a few thoughts, and often sit in silence.
I realized that I didn’t need to fill the quiet; I needed to listen to it.
We spend so many years proving our worth through doing—raising children, building careers, tending others—that we forget how to be.
The quiet strips that away. It asks nothing of us except honesty.
It teaches us to live with our own company, to find peace without applause, and to let ordinary moments speak for themselves.
And when we stop trying to outrun the quiet, it has a way of becoming something sacred—like the pause between breaths where life begins again.
What Remains After Loss
I’ve come to see that loss, in all its forms, doesn’t take everything. It pares life down to its essence, yes—but what remains can be astonishingly strong.
What remains are the habits of love—the phone calls we still make, the prayers we still whisper, the stories that surface when no one else is around to tell them.
What remains are the lessons our parents never said aloud but somehow taught us anyway.
What remains is the compassion that grows in the wake of our own vulnerability.
The world keeps changing—friends move away, our bodies remind us daily of their limits—but the heart, remarkably, keeps expanding.
It finds new ways to give, to notice beauty, to offer kindness.
I no longer expect to “get over” the things I’ve lost. Instead, I carry them with me —woven into the fabric of who I am.
And maybe that’s the quiet gift of aging: the growing awareness that we can hold sorrow and joy … and still be whole.
Perhaps that’s what William Blake meant when he wrote,
“Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.”
— William Blake
The threads may fray, but they hold. And in their weaving, life finds its beauty.
May you find, in that silken weaving, the quiet strength to live fully within both—and to know that what remains is always enough.
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