Grief and Secondary Losses
My son-in-law recently sent me an article called The Geometry of Grief by Maria Popova. If you're interested, you can find that HERE. I loved the following quote from the article.
"... every loss reveals what we are made of. But every loss also reveals what it is made of, which is more loss: Each loss takes a piece of us — a piece soft and alive — and leaves in its place something cold and heavy; each subsequent loss becomes the magnet that draws out those old leaden pieces, pulls them out from the reliquary of scar tissue where we have been keeping them in order to live, makes them rip through our being afresh. And yet the shrapnel pieces that surface are smaller and softer-edged than when they first entered through the open wound of raw bereavement, smoothed and contracted by the ongoingness of life."
Loss has a fractal nature, much like a snowflake. In the center is the original loss, and spanning out from there are subsequent similar losses. And also like a snowflake, grief and loss will look unique every time.
You can imagine this in any sort of loss scenario, but let's take a look at what this might look like if someone loses a husband.
First, is the loss of the person. But then because we've lost the person, we might also experience the loss of our co-parent, the loss of financial security, the loss of shared past and memories, loss of help, loss of traditions, loss of physical security, loss of emotional support, loss of routine, loss of couple friends, loss of inside jokes, loss of hopes for the future. The list can go on and on. Those secondary losses can lead to more losses. For example, the loss of income may result in the loss of the home you shared. Just because they are called secondary losses, doesn't mean they are less impactful or painful than the primary loss.
These secondary losses can be especially poignant at the holidays. Going back to the loss of the husband, he may have been the one to put up the outdoor lights, maybe he made the best hot chocolate, maybe he took the kids shopping for mom's gift, maybe he filled the stockings. We may not have remembered or noticed these secondary losses until the holidays, and that's why the holidays can feel like such a gut punch when you are grieving.
Often times we don't anticipate these secondary losses, so they can make grief more complicated. Learning about secondary losses helps us have more compassion on ourselves and on others when we realize the true magnitude of the loss that has occurred.
