Celebration in a Time of Loss

“Whoops!” I thought, when I saw the quote posted in this spot last week.  “That’s not what I meant.”

The words came from Donald Hall: “Old age is a ceremony of losses.”

The quotes I choose always seem new to me the first time I see them on my website, but it wasn’t the quote that stopped me.  It was the accompanying photo.  An old woman, her face in her hands, an image of despair.

My daughter, who designed and manages my website, chooses the images to accompany my quotes and blogs. She finds time in a demanding life for this work and does it cheerfully and skillfully. (She’s a professional marketer when she’s not helping her mother.)  And time after time she finds the most amazing photos to represent the often abstract ideas I present.

She did her usual good work this time.  No question.  The photo she found fits the quote perfectly.  Actually, it fits too well.

Still . . . there was no way for her—or anyone else—to know this, but I didn’t choose the quote for its despair. 

Why did I choose it? The moment I saw the image of the woman, I asked myself why.  That head-in hands image doesn’t represent the way I feel about my own aging, so why was the quote there at all?

(Correction . . . most days such an image doesn’t represent the way I feel.)

The losses that come with this time of life are real.  More than real.  Sometimes they are profound. 

The physical losses are annoying, bewildering, and too often humiliating.

The mental losses, the dimming of once bright passions, memories that skitter out of reach at every turn, words and ideas that repeat themselves when I’m not looking, can be soul wrenching.  Who am I if not this functioning mind?

But the external losses—the deaths of too many I have loved, the world’s diminishing promise—are the hardest to hold gracefully.

Still, I did not choose that quote primarily for the word “losses.”  It was another word that caught my attention.  “Ceremony.”

The idea of bringing “ceremony” together with “losses,” “a ceremony of losses,” captured me.

A ceremony is a celebration, though often a solemn one.  And that age can be, not just a series of losses, but a celebration of those losses, intrigued me. 

What a curious and wonderful idea!

Such a surprising meeting of words does something for me that the grieving woman in the photo fails to express, even contradicts.  It sanctifies my lived reality.

Even losses, maybe especially losses, are holy, because they speak of the goodness of the life they come out of.

Is all this just words?  A writer’s need to make things sound pretty? 

I’ll give just one example from my own life, and there is no “pretty” in it.  My son died in 2007.  He was only forty-two when a brain disease that had been stealing his life by inches finally had the last word.  No loss I have known has been more profound. 

Peter’s death altered who I am in this world.  And yet the infant he was, the boy, the man, still live within and enrich me.  That he came out of me, that he challenged me (oh, how he challenged me!), that he and I loved one another has made me a richer human being.  And certainly a more humble one, too.

The loss of my son lives in my bones, yet my heart rejoices in the fact of him. 

This is a time of celebration.  It is also a time of loss.  Profound loss.  In every corner of the globe we are grieving.

And we are rejoicing, too.

The two live together in surprising harmony.  Neither stops the other from existing.

So in this fraught time, this conflicted time, this precious, precious time, let us rejoice!

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash