loss

Loss is a constant in life.

While still just a boy I remember my Dad used to ask at the end of the day, when he came back from work, what I'd done through the day. As often as not I'd reply that I'd just been sort of 'messing around': nothing in particular.

You'll never get this day back again, he'd say. Remember that.

Another day gone. Another small portion of our allotted time on earth now lost, irretrievably, to what we call the past.

It's been 'loss' that's been foremost again today in the people I've been with.

Another day when there've been all sorts of people to see. All of them, one way or another, now dealing with loss.

A man in the morning who'd lost his job. It's strange to put it like that, mind you, since he knows very well where the job that he had can be found - and he took the decision himself to leave the job. But it's all now in the past. And at present he's marking time.

I was out at the Gyle to meet him for coffee there. Starbucks has its uses!

Work is a realm where a lot of our time is invested. That's what makes the loss of our job so hard. A part of ourselves is invested for good in the work that we've hitherto done.

Hours and days, and weeks and months, and often years - invested in this sphere of work. And now we'll never get them back again. Loss.

This is a man whose approach to his work is principled and good. He's glad to work and always works an honest day.

But he left his work - on principle: and the loss, I guess, is real. A part of his life's been invested there. And that's now gone. Consigned to the past.

Some years down the line (if I'm still on the go by then) I'll have to retire. I'll have to face that sort of loss myself - if not before. And I can't imagine it's easy at all. I invest so much, and I enjoy so much. My work is always fulfilling.

But one day soon I'll lose that part of life.

Retirement's like bereavement. It's all about 'loss'.

Bereavement's what I shared in later on. A man whose wife had died on Sunday past. Hardly old, since they're both still in their 60s. Barely a decade older than myself. A bit too close for comfort!

It's a grief that's real and profound. The lady who's died was a wonderful woman who'd filled the lives of her family with so many satisfying memories.

There's laughter and smiles and stories of all that they'd shared. And tears. A sorrow too deep for words to begin to express. A pain too acute to be borne.

I laugh and I smile along with them all: I listen to all that they're sharing, I enter their family life.

And I feel myself the huge big sense of 'loss' which simply fills the room in which we're sitting. A wife and a mother, a mother-in-law, a grand-mother, a friend. A world of special people all packaged there together in a single person's life. And now no longer there.

The loss is real and palpable: and very large.

Love almost always will issue one day in loss. That's the risk we take. That's the cost we bear. That's the price we pay.

And at night it's bereavement again. A couple for whom that searing sense of loss is now some four months old.

The pain of a parent in the loss of a child is as sharp and constantly stinging as any pain there is. Time is not the healer it's made out to be. They learn over time, for sure, how best they are able to handle the loss. But the pain's still there. The wound's still raw.

Their grief remains an ulcer which will give them no relief.

Loss.

We have to learn to live with it. And at the end of a day when I've been living once more with loss, I'm reminded of something I first read long ago - from the journal of Jim Elliot, a young American missionary who was martyred more than fifty years ago.

"He is no fool who loses what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."