“All new thinking is about loss/In this it resembles all the old thinking.”

— Robert Hass, Meditation at Lagunitas

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So much of my, and perhaps your, experience of life centers around loss and absence. Aging is the loss of youth, sickness the loss of health, homeless the loss of home, hunger and thirst the absence of food and drink, divorce the loss of a stable relationship, dementia the loss of sanity, dark and silence the absence of light and sound, death the absence of life…

In my experience, loss feels much more important than gain: Louisa and I have a game we play, when one of us finds something that was lost — keys, phone, library book. “Are you are as happy to have found it as you were unhappy when it was lost?” we ask the other. No, never. Loss is so much more intense! Loss is visceral — I can feel it in my body when my phone goes missing. But when I find it, it’s just, “Oh good, move on.”

It’s said that we only really appreciate someone by their absence. That was sure the case with “losing” both parents: regrets at not having this or that conversation, asking them questions that I’ll never know the answer to, wishing I’d said this or that I hadn’t said that. (For instance, they both lived through the depression, which was as catastrophic in Britain as it was in the US, if not more so. I wish I’d asked my Mum and Dad about their experience in the thirties.) Is that why we, at least as a society, fret about death? The loss of this body (presumably, unless death conquers all, including the First Law of Thermodynamics), the loss of memories (Second Law), the loss of sensation, of sunrises and sunsets, aroma of coffee, rain, stars at night?

I don’t hold with those who cling to the forlorn hope that death isn’t a loss at all, but a gaining of many good things in a blissful hereafter. Nor would I want that. The ancient Greeks, facing the approaching loss of life, were more down to Earth about their prospects; their hereafter was dull, dreary and boring as hell. Not Hell, though. Hades wasn’t a place of punishment, and (at least in their early mythology) saints and sinners shared the same fate: Your essence/psyche departed from your corpse, and there you were, rich man, poor man, beggar man and thief, stuck for ever in the gloom.

So, loss: Intrinsic to life and death. Alexander Graham Bell said that, when one door closes, another opens. Which, to this realist, sounds like sour grapes. Better to spend a few minutes or years fully grieving one’s loss than carrying on stoically and optimistically. And to remember, we feel loss acutely for good reason, because there were and are lessons to be learned in life. We’d never learn if we didn’t feel the pain/guilt/remorse which accompanies loss. And, if all else fails, there’s always Janis singing Kris Kristofferson: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…

We lost Janis, who joined the 27 Club (along with Brian, Jimi, Jim, Kurt and Amy) in 1970. That’s one loss I still grieve.