Fossilized Loss

“Whatever can be lost,

will be lost.”

                                           — Jennifer Welwood

I’ve slowly been preparing for The Mortality Meetings. There, I hope, Alexandra and I create a social space where people share a deepening exploration of the fears and opportunities that exist between here and the end of life. The two of us have been talking about that event and its subject matter. Recently we began a process that involved creating a grief altar to make our preparation more realistic. This is a story about that process and what it is touching off in me.

Neither of us have ever created a grief altar before. So, we don’t know what we are doing. Yet, we are letting our instincts and feelings guide us. One of the first things we decided to do is go through our own possessions to see if there is anything that might belong on the altar, to represent our grief.

In searching around my things, I found two items that really spoke to me about loss, a fossil of an old nautilus, and a wedding ring. This is the story of one of them. The fossil had been on my personal altar for a long time. So long, in fact, that I could no longer remember, where in my life, it came from. I was initially drawn to it, because it is so old, but soon that combined with an other awareness.

I don’t actually know how old this item is, so I have been saying ‘35 million years.’ I really don’t know, but that seemed adequately and appropriately old to me. Holding it in my hand (and you’ll have to visualize this) the rock-like object took me on a trip way back in deep time. The fossil had a new kind of life. It spoke to me. Down the years, came a realization that all living involved loss. I looked at this spiraling, many chambered being, in my hand, and I fell into a reverie.

I saw how each chamber was larger than the one which preceded it. Living had once upon a time proceeded from one place that formally been comfortable to a new larger unknown space, that was so huge and complex, that it brought new freedom and large uncertainty. I felt the walls of reality slowly pinching me, and the audacious and totally necessary excite of what loomed ahead. I felt the dance of good-by and hello, going on for millions of years.

I remembered the many chambers of life I’d already been through. My childhood, avoiding the draft, my first marriage, unemployment, graduate school, my second marriage, being a therapist, divorce and the rigors of disability. Now I’m Lucky, I’ve found a new life. In each case I grew into a larger, more spacious and demanding life. My life followed the pattern of the nautilus. I marveled over that fact. Each step forward was accompanied by giving up a former home. Each step meant entering a larger unoccupied space. Things had changed a lot, and that pattern had not changed at all. I was only a recent version of the nautilus, subject to the same inexorable law.

I am thinking now of the chamber I am occupying. I will be leaving it soon. Like the nautilus, this is the way I grow. To go on, everything around me eventually goes too. There is so much leave-taking! Oh, I know there is a lot to look forward to. But, for now, I just want to pay attention to passing. I’m going to leave it all soon. I can feel an urgency to go arising. I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon, but I’m savvy enough to know (I’ve been dragged around the block enough) that when I go isn’t my choice. I may, or may not, have time to say goodbye.

The weight of the fossil in my hand brings me back to the moment. I can feel my gratitude. I can feel how it has deepened and become more present, because I took the time to realize how much losing is a part of my life. There is a chamber I can enter, that perhaps the nautilus could not. I can see the pattern that joins us. The losses that accompany life and make sure it continues. There is a larger, more complex chamber I can enter, where my grief is joined in some magical way with the luminescence of Life proceeding. When I let this chamber, this phase of life, have its way with me, I can feel my gratitude, along with my grief.

It is not such a distasteful thing, grieving, when gratitude grows. Renewal has so  many forms.

l/d