After Loss

After loss I am changed. I am no longer the person I once was.

Something has been taken away. Connection. Innocence. Something has been added. Sorrow. Powerlessness. There’s less of this now, and more of that.  These facts alter…everything… about Who I am.

Others, who knew me ‘before’, now don’t know Who I am. But they don’ t know that they don’t know

But they don’t know that they don’ t know.

I feel disoriented, lost. Alone with this new knowing. I seek to reconnect with something familiar in this unfamiliar space of awful new information.

Little is familiar. Less is reliable. Nothing is truly known any more. I begin to realise that I have become disconnected from my past, my future. Myself.

Realising suddenly, and deeply acknowledging this shift within—that I’m indeed changed—I feel the urgent need to turn to my close, trusted person. I want to update them.  I want them to know about this critical alteration.

I need to locate myself; a point on a map that this Someone else holds.

This person knew me ‘as before’ loss. This person has seen all the variations of me over the decades. This person needs to ‘re-see’ me. I need them to help me to make sense of who I am in the aftermath of what’s happened. I need to be re-seen, so I can know myself again.

I want to be seen anew.

But, they— and the map… are gone.

Anguish slices me.

Their gaze can no longer fall on me, to draw the uniqueness of what they alone saw of me, in me — from me.  This me will never again be seen. Never be updated in their records, and integrated into my whole, long story, that they, uniquely, knew.

Now I discover aloneness in a new way, because I will always be alone with this knowledge. I am alone because there is no one to update.

That ‘I’ is no longer here; has become someone else. And this heaviest shift, this most significant alteration carries no weight— doesn’t matter— because no-one will ever know.

Other than me.

There can be no entry in the record books. No objective place to be found, upon the map. The record keeper, the map-holder, the beholding, distinguishing, discerning, perceptive, gentle all encompassing glance… is gone.

I’m alone.

How do you hold this alone?  How do you Be this—alone?  How do you hold this as truth, hold that you’re really You—when no-one knows about this vital inner recasting, when there’s no longer a reflection from the mirror that you knew and relied upon? No familiar verification of this new certainty from a trusted source?

Familiar faces are about, who believe they see ‘me’, but haven’t really looked. Don’t really see.  Don’t know the awful truth, the beautiful truth. The truth of me. I-am-always-in-this-moment-forever-changed.

I must encompass this loss too, into my altered Self: I will never be ‘seen’ again.

Now I understand ‘alone’.

Leave a Comment