Life, Love and Loss: Reflections for Old People like Me and for Younger People Too
By Robert Baird
I almost always ask my wife, Alice, to read in advance anything I have written for publication or presentation. For well over 50 years, she has been my honest, insightful and cherished critic. I confess that I did not run the title of this essay by her though, as I was afraid she would object to the “being old” part. But she saw it anyway. Not surprisingly though she did not object, agreeing that I was old. In fact, I am now in my 80s and, no matter how you mark time, that is old.
The reality of that was soberly brought home to me when I attended my most recent high school reunion. At the Friday night banquet, I surveyed the crowd. We had almost 600 in our graduating class, so even 60-plus years later we had a good group. As I looked around, I wondered: Who are these old people? Answer: They were the people I grew up with, spent a remarkable period of my life with, individuals with many of whom I went all the way back to elementary school or grammar school as we called it then. Who are all of these old people–my classmates and I.
That did not keep us from celebrating. We reminisced, laughed and even talked about the future. But somehow underneath it all was the awareness of loss.
Metaphorically speaking, there were empty chairs all around—empty spaces once filled by classmates now gone, more now gone than remaining. The loss was palpable. In addition to the loss of classmates, most (perhaps all) had lost both parents; many had lost spouses; several had lost siblings; a few, like Alice and me, had lost a child. And at least one of our classmates had lost a grandchild. There were empty seats; but hearts, while not empty, were not as full as they once had been.
Life is like that, increasingly filled with loss. But life is also filled with love. And nothing in life is more intimately connected than love and loss with the depth of loss directly related to the depth of love. That depth of love is also related to the fear of loss. What we love most, we most fear losing. That which we don’t mind losing, we don’t really love. It is part of the metaphysics of love, the nature of love, the character of love, to love most deeply the loss of that which would create the most pain, sometimes agonizing pain.
One of the most ecstatically happy experiences of my life was the moment I laid eyes on Kathy, our first-born. The moment of my deepest sadness (nothing else comes close), was her death.
We had gone to the hospital the night before Halloween, 1964. Alice went into a labor that was to last for hours, and in that Atlanta hospital, back in “ancient times,” husbands were left very much in the dark. Once Alice was admitted, I never saw her again until Kathy was born 20 hours later. Communication virtually nil, I had never experienced such anxiety. And then, I remember it as if it were last night, the first time ever I laid eyes on our new baby. Wrapped in a blanket, in a bassinet, behind a glass window, there she was, so beautiful, so peaceful, the stuff of which dreams are built. All who are parents understand.
Many of those dreams were realized. She grew from a baby to a little girl, and we loved her. She grew from a little girl to a teenager, and we loved her. Alice and I loved her teen-age years. She moved through college and law school, and we loved her. She became a prosecuting attorney and eventually joined a law school faculty, and we loved her. She married and became a mother herself and added more love into our lives.
In addition to all that love, for me, there was the remarkable pleasure of working with her professionally. We edited three books together. What a loving and joyful life we had with Kathy. And then we lost her.
For the first time in her life at the age of 45, she went into a depression. She came out of that depression once, but the remission did not last; and at the age of 47, in a depression so deep she could not bear it, we lost her–a loss that is and always will be very much a part of who I am, who Alice is, who we are as a couple.
Survey almost any community, and I think of my own community of faith, the loss and abiding pain over the loss will be pervasive. The loss, of course, is intimately tied to love and the greater the love, the greater the loss. The apostle Paul said: There is faith and hope and love, but the greatest of these is love. That is right. But also from the greatest of our loves, comes the greatest of our losses, our pains.
One of the oldest of all philosophical and theological problems is so old that it predates the advent of Christ. Thoughtful Greeks, hundreds of years before the Christian era, puzzled: If God the Creator is all good and all powerful, why is there so much pain and suffering in life?
Despite the best and the brightest struggling to answer that question, the question remains. And the God who speaks in so many ways, including the way of Christ, often seems silent. But maybe that is not altogether so. Sometimes in my struggles over the truth of the matter with regard to loss and suffering, there is a dimension of the Christian story that for me has depth and power.
We Christians speak of God the Creator, God the Redeemer; we even speak at times of Christ the King. But the dimension of the Christian story that seems most authentic to me is not God the Creator, Redeemer or King (as important as those ideas are), but the remarkable picture of a God who so loves us that he shares in and thus understands our pain and loss. For at the heart of the New Testament is an amazing image, the picture of the Holy One suffering and thus identifying with our suffering.
A passage from the Gospel of John, the familiar story of the raising of Lazarus, contains right in the middle of the story, almost buried, two powerful sentences. “Jesus wept. He cried because his friend Lazarus, whom he loved so, had died” (John 11:1-44). Maybe the deepest truth is that love IS the greatest of all experiences, but that there cannot be love without the possibility of loss.
Recall the opening lines of that moving poem by James Weldon Johnson, The Creation!
And God stepped out on space
And he looked around and said
I’m lonely—
I’ll make me a world
We can imagine this God wanting to create a world that contained faith, hope and love; but maybe there is no way to create the greatest of these (love) without permitting the most painful of these: the loss of what is loved. Maybe, just maybe, you cannot have the wonder of love without the darkness of loss. Maybe the connection between love and loss is so intimate that even God cannot pull them apart.
So, James Weldon Johnson, rewrite it a bit:
I’m lonely. I’ll make me a world
A world with love.
But love without loss is not possible.
So it will be a world with pain
But I will so love this world that I too will experience the losses
I too will share the pain.
Alice recently came across the reflections of an old person, reflections about loss and grief which were filled with wisdom and hope. It appeared anonymously. Here it is, with a few additions. If you have suffered loss, perhaps it reflects your experience. If you have not suffered deep loss, consider it anyway. There is wisdom here:
I am old [the writer says.] What that means is that I've survived, so far, and a lot of people I've known and loved have not. I've lost best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, other relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks.
I’ve never gotten used to people dying, never have, but here's my two cents about losing those whom we love. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don't want it to "not matter". I don't want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love that I had for that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love.
Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love.
As for grief [he continues], you'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you're drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was and is no more. And all you can do is float.
You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating along side you [and you hang on to one another, floating together so that neither of you sinks]. For a while, all you can do is float. [All you can do is keep on keeping on. All you can do is walk and not faint.]
In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come farther apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function.
You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, or the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything . . . and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.
Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall; or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come farther apart. You can see them coming: an anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas . . . . You can see the pain coming, and for the most part, you can prepare yourself. And when the wave washes over you, you know that somehow you will again come out on the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out.
[This writer concludes:] Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. Other waves will come and you'll survive them too.
If you're lucky, you'll have lots of scars because you will have had lots of loves.
The scripture says “Jesus wept.” Jesus cried because his friend, Lazarus, whom he loved so much, had died (John 11:1-44). Alice and I have also cried because one we loved with all our hearts died. And you are reading this essay have cried because one you loved so much died. And if you have not cried, you will because you love. And despite the pain, nothing is greater than love.
Robert Baird is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University. This essay is a revision of a sermon originally preached at Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco, Texas.
