Loss of memory through the death of others

People die. We grieve. We mourn. The ache lingers. We dissolve ourselves in the routines of life, and still the ache stabs us. Some little thought, a photograph, a song, a place, a flower, a car, a book, a smell, a taste, a sound, a flash of light through the trees plunges a rapier through our calm demeanor and our quotidian routine. We crumble into despair.

When we lose a friend or a family member, we lose pieces of ourselves. What died with them was a part of us, and that part is taken away. Our collective memory loses its fullness. Without others' memories to help keep alive our own, we lose whole parts of ourselves, for it is experience and memory that makes us what we are — social, sentient beings reliant on others to keep our memories straight.

The pain of aging is in losing, one by one, those who have been a part of your life for decades. First parents and aunts and uncles, then your own generation, cousins and siblings, and contemporaries, friends from childhood or later. Each of them carries away knowledge of you in the form of memories, some of them many decades old. With each death, we are a little less of what we had been. We are left an incomplete version of living, a flawed recollection that cannot be supplemented or ignited ever again.

If the elderly seem thinner, more fragile, or slower, it may be because they have seen too many memories buried, too many pieces of themselves cremated. They become an abridged version, a redacted life.

Mourning the loss of a job

A former colleague who had heard about my layoff dropped by last week with a loaf of fresh-from-the-oven cinnamon bread. "I know it's not like a death in the family," she said, "but it is a kind of a death." I thanked her for the cinnamon bread and ate it for breakfast the next two mornings. It was delicious!

And I also reflected on her comparison of a job loss to a family death. I began to see some similarities. A job loss can hurt more than a loved one's death. A death can be a natural transition, the final step of a long life and a relief to someone who has suffered and deteriorated almost beyond recognition. Death might have a long-term impact on family finances, or it might not. A job loss almost certainly will affect family finances, sometimes tragically.

It is said that mourning has several stages: shock, denial, anger, resignation, acceptance. Losing a job can spark those same emotions. I experienced shock as a loss of sensation. I stopped breathing. My mind reeled. I couldn't stand. The shock was similar to what I had experienced when I learned of the death of family members.

I skipped denial when I was laid off and went straight to anger, as did a number of friends and family members to whom I broke the news. But just as with a death, anger is wasted in a job loss. Although anger might be justified, it is unlikely to bring your job back. In almost every case, anger is more self-destructive than tactically effective. A seething anger will ultimately spoil your entire viewpoint, and won't get you a new job.

For me, resignation, acceptance and peace came quickly. I found myself glad not to be in the turmoil that my vocation had become. And although I don't yet know what my new career might be, I've received enough encouragement from loyal friends to think that God has a plan for what remains of my working life. I'm eager to see what that might be.