Early in life I learned that we lose everyone we love. In a matter of months my mother became unwell, I lost two of my closest relatives and my extended family became irreconcilably estranged. What had been a medium-sized family shrunk to a barely recognisable party of two – that is, if my mother pulled though.
During this time I came to understand something that I had been shielded from as a child: relationships were inherently unstable, love would invariably turn to grief and loss was an undeniable fact of life. Indeed, loving and losing were fundamental terms of the human contract to which I was an unknowing signatory.
As disenchantment set in, I developed a cautious view of human attachment. I held parts of myself back, worrying intimacy would backfire and that I would, again, risk insurmountable heartbreak. Of course, something intelligent was at play: the more I avoided connection, the less likely I was to suffer when relationships ended or change formed. I soon learned, however, that this was an unbearably narrow place to live from, a place that denied the breadth and striking dimensionality of human connection.
Decades later, on my first month-long Buddhist Vipassana retreat, I sobbed as memories of my relatives coursed through my meditation; not an uncommon experience within the container of silence. I never had said goodbye all those years ago. As the heart released, a tender and rounded sorrow took hold, and I began to soften. Perhaps the path back to connection could be found within the grief itself.
Still, the question remained: how can we love fully in the face of inevitable loss?
A modern Buddhist response hinges on releasing attachment, accepting change and opening to the radical suggestion that loss is not always as it seems.
The Pulitzer prize-winning poet Mary Oliver captures something of this approach in her poem In Blackwater Woods. She writes:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones
knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Oliver’s evocation invites us to love with abandon, to release our fears and ultimately to let go when the time is right. It’s a tall order yet it captures the delicacy and profundity of the dance we are part of so long as we love.
In Buddhism there is an important distinction between love and attachment. Attachment can masquerade as love but seeks to control and possess. It grasps tightly and uses the beloved to selfishly serve its own desires. It places rigid expectations on the other and fails to see them for who they really are but rather what they can do for us.
Love, on the other hand, is the genuine wish for another to be well and happy regardless of the circumstances. According to the Buddha, love is unconditional, promotes peace in the heart of the giver and receiver and encourages social harmony. It accepts circumstances as they are and does not seek to manipulate or change another. Love comes with an open hand.
Our capacity for real love, as the Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg calls it, unfolds gradually over time and is proportionate to our willingness to loosen the grip of our attachment to our expectations of those around us.
In extending this to loss, the art is to let go of what we had hoped for and let go into what we are given. In loss, we are gifted “a box full of darkness”, as Mary Oliver puts it. This is a strange and unwanted gift, yes, but accepting it can bring us back into connection.
Later in my adult life I lost a best friend to an aggressive cancer. This time I trusted the fires of loss. A few weeks before her death I bought her a plate printed with images of frogs. She was whimsical and a lover of animals and I knew it would make her chuckle. Each day her carers used it for her meals.
A few days after her death two frogs appeared on my front step. And on the day of her birthday I opened the front door to find yet another frog perched as though waiting to be welcomed inside.
Some would say it was a coincidence, synchronicity at best, and perhaps they are right, but I took it as a cosmic wink, a strange gift that emerged from that box of darkness, a testament to our ongoing love, wrapped in a new form.
To let go in love is to accept change, separation and heartbreak and to trust what is given – grief, sorrow and yearning – and know that this, too, is a facet of our human heart that can pave the way for a new and sublime form of kinship.
Dr Nadine Levy is a senior lecturer at the Nan Tien Institute. She coordinates its health and social wellbeing program and the graduate certificate in applied mindfulness
