Learning to Love and Live Again After Loss
It is possible to live again after loss.
Living has many angles and aspects to it. It includes feeling alive, enjoying beauty, expressing gratitude, feeling wonder and excitement, appreciating the taste of good food and enjoying new love.
As I have focused on holding grief in one hand and life in the other, my grief over time has shrunk in size and impact while life has grown increasingly larger.
This week a very exciting event took place — I got engaged!
That will shock some of you and excite others. Yes, I am marrying my good friend Jean who I’ve known for years but now look forward to having as my wife.
Experiencing a Second First
I didn’t get here by accident or without a great deal of healing, self reflection, and soul work. What I do know is that I am ready to marry again and experience a second first.
I learned the phrase second first from author and grief specialist Christina Rasmussen. She showed in her book Second Firsts how life could emerge on the other side of deep loss and grief. I took to heart her teaching and over time stepped into a new life. Listen to how she describes this new life after loss.
As you step into this new life, you could take the opportunity to re-ignite parts of yourself that dimmed because of your loss. You could drop behaviors and attitudes that you don't want to keep. You could take up new hobbies. You could make new friends. Travel to new places. Change your job. Move. Fall in love again. It's your choice. You have a choice to create a new you, so you can experience new firsts – second firsts.” Second Firsts, page xxi
What is Means to Love and Live Again After Loss
If you are in a place where your grief is raw and fresh, it may be challenging to even think about what I’m experiencing and writing about. I am very sensitive to those who are not where I am. I sit with those fresh in their grief in the grief group I facilitate. Those of you who have lost your spouse may not be ready to date again (I wasn’t for three years) or will never date again.
Getting married again is only one part of a multifaceted life I’m learning to live. Living encompasses a full range of experience. It include new friendships, new experiences, traveling to new places, dropping old behaviors and attitudes, learning a new identity and purpose, and finding a way to make meaning in the midst of loss.
Though loss feels painful, you are in control of who you get to be and what happens next. Of this I am sure: creating a new lifestyle will require you to change your thoughts and to form new daily habits. Above everything, it will require you to plug in to life day after day after day, no matter how devastating the loss you experienced. How you think, what you do, and the way you participate in life will change your brain and identity, even if only in subtle ways.
— Second Firsts, p. xxi
Final Thoughts
My desire is to give you hope especially if you are in the valley of deep grief. Deep grief doesn’t need to last forever. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. It will look different for everyone but I do believe it’s possible to live again while holding space for what you’ve lost.
May you continue to grieve thoroughly, learn and apply the new ideas you need to shape your thoughts and behavior, find empathetic witnesses to tell your story to, find ways to help others with the help you have received, and believe that you can live again after loss.
