I’m increasingly aware of the challenge of accepting losses as I age. This week’s post is about “necessary losses” and my experience in making peace with them.

As I reflected on this topic, the writer Judith Viorst kept coming to mind. She wrote two books that have shaped my ideas about loss. 

I came upon her first book as a young parent when I discovered her children’s books. She wrote a series of books about a young boy named Alexander who was plagued with bad luck or predictable difficult experiences, depending on your perspective. My favorite is Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day. As you might imagine, Alexander experiences a number of what he sees as devastating moments – gum in his hair, not getting any prize at the bottom of the cereal box, falling off his skate board, his mom forgetting to put dessert in his lunch, and being forced to eat lima beans for dinner! His day is so bad he decides he is going to move to Australia!

The book concludes with the sad truth that there are “terrible, horrible, very bad days, even in Australia!” I found this to be such a simple and powerful reminder of M. Scott Peck’s opening sentence in his best seller The Road Less Travelled: “Life is difficult.”  I was so taken by the brilliance of the Alexander story that I would read excerpts to the staff (as a manager) when we had budget cuts or other difficulties in our nonprofit. 

A wise woman mentor suggested I read Judith Viorst’s adult book Necessary Losses, which was published in the late 1980s. Viorst draws on her personal experiences and work as a psychoanalysis researcher to lay out the predictability and developmental importance of accepting life’s losses. She includes the losses of our mother’s protection, illusions and unrealistic expectations about relationships, aging and letting go of our younger self-identity, and ultimately, the loss of loved ones through separation and death. 

In truth, I am much more familiar with her Terrible Horrible Day book because I read it repeatedly to children and adults; I easily got the message. Necessary Losses is a 448-page work, both engaging and scholarly.  It’s based on her research and curiosity about what she was experiencing. I never could get through the whole book- I read enough to get the big ideas.

And those big ideas stuck with me for over 30 years. As I go to more and more funerals of friends and family members, thoughts of my own aging and mortality are unavoidable. There are two funeral services this weekend; and I learned Friday that a school friend who was in the last stages of Alzheimer’s died. 

Other losses are not as obvious and yet are unavoidable. As a 76-year-old author on a topic I consider important, I am facing the difficulties of launching a book into the world; and I am considering my own energies and interest in spending time this way. At this point of my life, my personality prefers the quiet of writing to the continuous interaction with others required to introduce a book and its ideas in a world overrun with stuff. 

What I’ve learned about all my necessary losses is that denying them or trying too hard to avoid them is folly. In fact, full surrender is the only real solution. Acting like I am different and won’t experience these losses only fuels my need to stay busy and avoid the difficult feelings that come with loss. We have words for these feelings – grief, anguish, sadness, outrage, depression. These are not fun feelings for me; I’m tempted to avoid them or call them something else.

Yet, inevitably for a moment or two, I accept that indeed I am experiencing a loss, often more than one, and more than one type. I slowly come to accept that I don’t know how to move through this because I’ve never experienced this exact combination of losses before. 

So, I talk to friends, lean into my faith and spiritual practices. For this current situation, I am going back into therapy to explore what this new set of losses has to teach me. As difficult as it is to welcome losses, all my other responses are more painful. They merely delay the inevitable surrender and ultimate lessons of these losses. Judith Viorst did get it right – losses are necessary.