Coping with Loss

coping with loss

Is it coping with loss? Or is it living with loss?

When loss initially happens, everything changes. The life we knew before is no longer.

Loss is not a temporary setback. It is not something we experience and get over. We do not move on. We move into a different world. The world of before the loss is now the world of the Afterloss.

If you’re coping with the death of a child, books for grieving the loss of a child can help you, but coping the loss of anyone has common threads that we all go through. Living with loss is about living in love no matter what the circumstances are.

In the beginning, to merely cope, to just survive, is a victory in and of itself. In the middle of the emotional earthquake that shatters the world around us and within us, coping is all we can do; and all that needs to be done to help with grief.

But there comes that day when the world around us moves on and we must find a way to move into the loss. Others will go back to their lives, but what do we go back to?

Others may think that coping with loss is getting over it. They think that we deal with the pain, shelve it somewhere and get on with it.

Coping with loss needs to become living with loss. How do we live in this new world of the Afterloss now that the world of Before is no longer? How do we live beyond coping? How do we go beyond surviving a day and falling into an exhaustive night?

Grief is learning to live with loss. Grief work is about how to reintegrate what is gone and what is left into a new life.

Normality is gone. Grief is about finding footing in the new normal.

Going beyond just coping with loss is about creating a life lived to the fullest while being able to embrace the emptiness that shadows loss. It is about finding a way to live with the hurt within the healing.

So many think healing is about moving on or getting over “it.”

Loss is not an “it.” Loss is about shattered lives, broken hearts, love longing for love. Out of the Ashes: Healing in the Afterloss is about living beyond just dealing with a death. It is a story of living in both loss and love; it’s about living in a forever-changed life.

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