Spaces of Grief: Chapter 1 (Conversations from 2016-2017)
S: I know this is a weird question to ask a person I just met... But why loss?
K: I have had a relationship with loss for as long as I can remember.
K: I had a recent experience where my father had a serious medical emergency. It was a sudden emergency and while we are deeply grateful and blessed that he survived it, it was touch and go. The feeling of life turning in seconds and what I call the ‘almost loss experience’ never really left me. In that moment, I felt like my calling was to focus on understanding the emotions that people experience in the face of loss.
Where it took me was to explore my own relationship with loss and I realized that my birth began with abstracted loss.
It has been omnipresent and continues to be to this date. I am adopted, and I don’t really know anything about who my birth parents are or were. There is no way for me to know what culture, region or language I belong to. So my foundation in some way began in this life. While I am deeply grateful for the family I have, there is a sense of a looming loss, something that I can’t really define, something I can’t completely touch and feel, but something that exists in a real way: it’s like a feeling more than a memory really. Perhaps the pain of it makes me feel others' pain, and create meaning for them.
S: I don’t know if I find meaning in loss, or if loss is what gives meaning to everything else that remains, you know?... I lost my nana (grandfather) when I was 10. It wasn’t unexpected, it wasn’t sudden, it wasn’t anything other than what a life full lived should be.. And still it sucked. It was the first time I thought about death. It’s so weird how with the first loss we experience, we also have to for-the-very-first-time process the concept of mortality. That’s a lot for a 10 year old.. That’s a lot for me now! Last year I lost nani (grandmother) too. Officially grand-parent-less now.
S: I wonder how we’re supposed to feel acceptance towards something that has so much unknown…
K: Letting go of some (and eventually most) of the ‘why’ questions, because most of the answers feel less than satisfactory, and often are speculations anyway.
S: Yeah, maybe you’re right..
We spend so much time asking why with almost complete awareness we’ll never really know. Nani never drank, or smoked or did anything you conventionally associate with cancer, and she still got it real bad.
In her case, it turned out to be genetic, something that ran in the family. And knowing this “why” probably caused me more stress than not knowing it at all. Because if it was genetic for her, it could be for me or my mom or my cousins or my aunts too.
In some ways letting go of the why, to make room for the who and what has helped me process things.
These days I try to let myself remember who they were and what they meant to me.. what they saw in me, what they hoped for me and who they hoped I’d someday become. Maybe sometimes it’s easier to let those who aren’t around guide you more than you let yourself rely on anyone here.
S: It’s strange how we all have such different stories, but in some ways, loss is common to everyone, everywhere.
K: Tell me about what your nani was like...
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