Responding to Loss

Summary

It is hard to know what to do with loss, whether the loss is our own, or someone else’s. We can feel overwhelmed by loss, and overwhelmed by the cumulative effect of loss. We can respond to loss in a variety of ways; we can become bitter about how life has treated us, or entrenched in the grief over our loss; we can also ignore loss and move on as if it didn’t happen; or we can face our losses, name them, look them in the eye and do the work we have to do to bring some form of healing.

As a planning committee, we knew that after hearing the stories of loss last week, that we’d need a week to reflect on how we respond to loss. So often we feel helpless in the face of loss, particularly other people’s losses. And we can also feel guilty about our own “good fortune”. As a community of care, how do we respond to someone’s loss of health, particularly when others have just received a clean bill of health; or the loss of a job after someone else has just been promoted; or how do we respond to the pain of infertility and celebrate the birth of a new baby, or 50 years of marriage after someone else’s marriage has just ended? Or how do we respond to someone’s loss of faith in God when that is the centre of our life of faith as a community?