Endings and Losses

The first phase of moving through transition

A few days ago I wrote an article that outlines the three phases of transition, which were developed by Dr. William Bridges. Bridges produced a great deal of excellent work on how to move through the emotional transition process which is the inevitable out come of changes.

Here’s that piece:

In this article I’m going to walk through the process of Endings and Losses to show you what that looks like. My hope is that this will give you a template for doing your own, which is the critical first step not only in allowing ourselves to grieve but also to eventually move on, largely unburdened.

Quick setup: I’m a 67-year-old international adventure traveler, prize-winning author and journalist, professional speaker. Decades of experience in Fortune 500 consulting, training and sales. I have been rapidly building my travel writing and consulting expertise, my followership on Medium. I was just about to put my house up for sale and move to Oregon, a long-standing dream, and spend three months a year in Colombia.

Like everyone else, all this came screeching to a halt. Unlike many, I don’t have a lot of time to rebuild. Like many of my peers past sixty, I am deeply concerned with how I make the most of the time I am given.

Here are my Endings, as I currently see them (and more happen daily, which is part of why this process is so essential)

1. Travel has ended. Travel is the great love of my life.
2. My career as a travel writer/ adventure traveler is over.
3. My dream of moving to Oregon has ended.
4. I can’t ride horses any more, which is the other love of my life.
5. My gym career is over after 46 years.
6. My dating life has died (it was dead already but that’s another story).
7. My plan to get certified in equine massage is over.
8. The book I was writing is no longer in play, for it’s no longer relevant.
9. My plan to reboot my speaking career is canned.

Those are the biggest ones. I’m just going to concentrate on the big rocks. There are plenty of pebbles, which too many of us make much larger than they really are.

You could legitimately say that for each of these you could put “for now” after the statement. That’s very true. However, because it’s critically important to deal with things as they are right now rather than how I might wish them to be, for now, these things are ended.

I can’t emphasize enough that when we let go of what has ended for us, we make room for what’s coming. In the highest possible sense, whatever we are supposed to be doing next will show up. Often that’s in a wholly different form, often much better than we could possibly have imagined.

Knowing this is the very definition of having faith.

The next step is to list Losses. When a way of life, a way of being ends for us, whether it’s a beloved job or access to a space and place we love, we feel deep sorrow, which is the loss. Our society doesn’t grapple well with grief:

Most of us rush past any kind of grief to the first and most powerful diversion, whether is substances or alcohol or sex or work. Avoidance is one answer. That buries the grief where it can do terrible harm to us physically and emotionally. Grief is an inevitable part of life, as important as the heights of joy. We can’t have one without the other.

To grieve is to feel, and it manifests itself in the body in powerful ways. It’s a process. Understanding what it is, how it works, what it feels like empowers us to embrace it, let it move through us like breathing air, and also allow it to pass over time. Please see this:

These are my losses, the things I’m grieving:

1. No access to my beloved friends other than by phone.
2. I can’t ride, play with horses, dogs or other animals.
3. I can’t make a living doing what I most love right now: travel.
4. I can’t plan a trip overseas. I live for such things.
5. I can’t work out my sadness and frustration at my gym. All my weights and gear but for very few pieces are packed up, leaving me with a bare bones collection of mixed gear to create a daily workout session. I have lost the familiarity and safety of my gym.
6. I can’t get the important personal care that I need especially now: chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, shots for my arthritic hands, dental care. I am friends with those providers so it’s a double loss.
7. My freedom. My precious, delicious, exquisite physical freedom to travel, ride, climb, kayak, adventure as I wish.

There are many more losses than these and they add up at my emotional doorstep every day.

Your endings and losses are going to be very different from mine. I have a friend whose May wedding is on hold. I have friends like me who were ready to sell and move, or move overseas. Each of us has many life goals that have been put on hold, or shattered completely. For some, like my Medium buddy Gillian Sisley, we’ve seen our income plummet, and with that, our dreams crash to the ground as well. Here’s her piece:

There are plenty of people whose situations and options are far worse off than mine. Yours. Gillian’s. My buddy JC, who watched his entire , exciting, brand new digital marketing company crash to the earth right in front of him. Kindly, I’m well aware of that. All I am doing here is teaching a process, not making a moral statement of who is better off than someone else.

Comparisons in any case do not make you and me feel better. Because what is deeply painful for me has nothing to do with you, or with Shannon Ashley or Tim Denning or anyone else. While perspectives are indeed important, when it comes to endings and losses, how those feel to us is our own sacred work. They are not necessarily lessened in their intensity by saying others have it worse. Those people aren’t you. They don’t live your life. Nor do you necessarily owe them something for having different life circumstances.

Transition is private, personal internal work. It is at times helped with input from others, but like all the most important human arcs, we only become archangels for ourselves and each other by doing the work.

Grief is deeply private. And it’s also absolutely essential to our health:

This article helps us understand one reason why the elderly are so very susceptible to the virus. Heartbreak (as in losing loved ones at a nursing home) weakens us even more. Grief can batter the immune system. There’s a cascade of effects that make our immune systems more vulnerable.

The reason this is so important right now, especially if you’re older is this:

If you entered this period in the middle of an horrific divorce, had just lost a loved one, were recovering from a disaster or were already devastated, imagine the condition your poor body is in right now. Then imagine how much more swiftly you can get seriously ill, much more so than if you felt positive and encouraged. Our bodies and immune systems are already roughed up as though we’d just lost a prize fight. We are no match for Corona.

From the WebMD article:

Symptoms of complicated grief include persistent efforts to ignore the grief and deny or “rewrite” what happened. Complicated grief increases the risk of physical and mental health problems like depression, anxiety, sleep issues, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and physical illness.

This is just one reason why you and I would be wise to honor the grief work. It strengthens us, empowers our immune systems, and builds emotional strength. That permission to feel sadness, which I most certainly feel, is part of what later allows me to move into the next phase. Like everything else, learning to accept the grieving process when we have acknowledged our Endings and Losses is building a powerful survival and thrival muscle set.

In some important ways, since I’ve trained this material for years and also have been through plenty of big losses, this process of going through grief has gotten a little easier. I’m not going to tell you I dance my way through the daisies. That would insult your intelligence and it would be a lie.

I can tell you that I no longer resist the need to lie down and nap. Cry into a pillow. Curl up with my aged teddy bear Gerry like a two-year-old and emotionally suck my thumb for a while. I can say that I have learned to sit quietly on my porch, watching the light rise as my tears fall, and find a kind of peace in understanding passages. I do not beat myself up for taking two weeks to finally start my stair-running program. And I most certainly do NOT avoid, or take on huge new projects to try to bury the important feelings. I have learned the rightness of things, how to release my attachments to shoulds, should-have-beens, entitlements, I deserves, the lot.

What’s different today is that I understand what’s going on. I acknowledge the need to rest my body, allow the tears, and feel the pain. When I do that, it moves through me. The more identified I am with what was, the harder I hang onto it. That will drown me faster than having the Mafia tie a concrete block to my foot and toss me into then East River. That would be a lot quicker and lot less painful. But.

Pain has a purpose. A holy purpose.

Pain underscores what I cared about. Honors what I loved. Allows me to feel gratitude for what I had. It helps me uproot the systems that tie me to the past. In some critically important ways, that pain pushes me from the dock and allows me to sail into the unknown future. I feel what I feel as I wave goodbye to the dreams and hopes and desires and wants that I leave standing on the dock.

As I work through that, when I am ready, I take care of myself. Again from the WebMD article:

Emotional and physical self-care are essential ways to ease complications of grief and boost recovery. Exercising, spending time in nature, getting enough sleep, and talking to loved ones can help with physical and mental health.

“Most often, normal grief does not require professional intervention,” says Zisook. “Grief is a natural, instinctive response to loss, adaptation occurs naturally, and healing is the natural outcome,” especially with “time and the support of loved ones and friends.”

My personal RX includes black humor, exercise, long hot bubble baths, laugh sessions with friends (all of whom are going through the same thing right now), more exercise, getting plenty of sleep, and giving myself full permission to take my time before I leap into a brand new activity. I make sure that new activity isn’t a diversion, but that I am emotionally ready for it.

Above all, time in Nature. Mother knows what she’s doing. Animals grieve just as we do, in their own ways. Some die of broken hearts, just as we can. Emotions are part of our world, shared by all things, often in ways we are just now learning to appreciate and understand. In a remarkable story from Dr. Carl Safina, one of the world’s great ecologists and writers, he tells of an orca which insistently communicated to a group in a boat, in the only way it could, and the boaters finally followed it. The orca took them to a boat where a woman had committed suicide.

All living things know grief. It is part of life. It is part of being. It is part of the Cycle of All Things.

Learning to embrace what you and I watched End is a first step. Then listing our Losses is the next.

Then we sit. We allow. The waves come and go. They bring pain and they bring relief. We only drown when we struggle to avoid the pain. Pain which is as much a part of life as giving birth, as falling in love, as cradling a child, as cupping a beloved’s face.

To live is to lose. To love is to feel loss. To be alive is to know endings.

Endings are holy. Losses teach us to let go. Letting go, with gratitude, with tears, with eventual joy, allows us to live more fully.

And freed, we are able to move into What’s Next.

My next article will address how to formalize your losses. Thank you for your comments, highlights and referrals. All that helps me focus on what’s helping.