Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All

She meant, I think, that a love lost is grieved forever, whatever the nature of the loss — this she knew, and turned the ongoingness of it into a lifetime of art — but by looking back, we are reminded over and over that the sharp edge of grief does smooth over time, that today’s blunt ache is worlds apart from the first stabs, until grief becomes, ... See more

Yet the fundamental loss remains—it doesn’t just dissipate—and, in a strange way, I think it can become a magnet for other losses. We come to see we are all simply creatures carrying around our ever-deepening loss. Small griefs seem to collect around the bigger primary grief. I think this realization allows us to become a true human being.

Everything passes, everyone around us dies: the people we love, the things we love, the world around us, our parents, our grandparents, our children, our spouse, our strength, our capacities, the redwoods of California, the skyline of New York—all of it is sliding away, all this perfection sinking into the earth. And we know this. We try to hold on

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And that’s the wonder and danger of love, isn’t it? We find ourselves overcome by other selves. New, strange urges. That’s why we often measure passion by the distance from which it takes us from our accepted self-concepts. Love reminds us of how little we know of our limits and how afraid we are of losing them. We are such porous creatures. We are

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Indeed, when Kant's friend Funk died, he found himself forced to confront what is in some ways the ultimate example of the instant of change: the fact that all that we love will pass, including life itself. Even more poignantly, the very ineradicable nature of that constant, irresistible erosion of the present is what endows our life and the attach

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Understood this way, then, the ongoing relationship with the gone is a lavishment to other loves, for it has made us exactly who we are — the person doing the loving, the person being loved, the mapmaker of present and possible worlds. O’Connor offers neural affirmation for this poetic aspiration: