What You Don’t Know About Grief and Loss

So much has been written about grief and loss — nearly 250,000,000 articles, as of this writing, via a quick Google search. Could there really be anything more to add to the Brobdingnagian body of literature on the subject?

Yes, indeed, there is.

For the last two decades, I’ve been on what I’ll call a “souljourn” — studying, on the one hand, world religion, philosophy, ethics, culture, and conflict; and on the other, psychology generally, trauma specifically, and resilience. I’ve also worked as a therapist, clinical ethicist, and researcher. I’ve been present and births and deaths, held hands with those in the throes of despair, listened to and counseled people struggling with the weight of moral injury and moral distress, and sat in the room when the ultimate decisions about life were being made. I’ve also been on the precipice of existence myself on a few different occasions, having to do with my health. The human condition, with all its funk, strife, awe, and wonder, has been — and remains — the landscape of my life.

So, when I say that there is something crucial missing from all the “grief and loss” talk and approaches to healing, it comes from direct experience. And what’s missing is this: the understanding that meaningful loss — whether that is a loved one or friend, pet, your health, security, job, finances, relationship, faith, trust, moral compass, dignity, an opportunity, and so on — is a dual loss: you’ve not only lost the thing itself, but also a part of yourself: your innocence. This is a subtle distinction and not one I’ve seen put in this way; but it is an important one because how you engage this loss of innocence speaks directly to your ability to heal and move forward in life with resilience.

What it means to lose your innocence

One of life’s greatest ironies is that we spend our childhood waiting to be adults and our adulthood trying to recapture that childlike innocence. When we’re young, we yearn for the secret code that unlocks the forbidden door that only grown-ups can access. But as adults, having witnessed in any number of ways the mysteries that lie behind that door, we sometimes wish we had never found or been given the key. Only in hindsight can we realize that to know or have experienced less is often much easier (and less painful) than to know or have experienced more.

Lost innocence is a dual loss

Whenever we lose something, we actually lose two things. For instance, if we lose our keys, we also lose some time and peace of mind while we try to find or replace them. Or, if we lose our favorite sunglasses or watch, we also lose the money we spent on them, as well as a little “face” because we feel embarrassed that we carelessly left them somewhere unintended. But when we lose something meaningful, something that is very dear to us, not only do we lose the person or thing itself, but also we lose a part of ourselves: our innocence.

Lost innocence is the chipping away of some precious ideal or principle, the crumbling of a certain freedom, confidence, wholeness, or integrity that we have come to rely upon. It’s the passing away of a happy ignorance that previously protected us from the painful stuff of life.

At its core, lost innocence is a “felt sense” deep inside — one that makes our muscles tighten, our stomach turn, or our heart feel heavy when we suddenly become aware that we, others, even life itself are imperfect and limited; that bad things really do happen to good people, and sometimes for no good reason; that physical pain (such as illness, injury, exhaustion, old age, and eventually death) and emotional suffering (such as fear, frustration, disappointment, and despair) are inescapable parts of life; and that knowledge, as reliable as it can be, is sometimes flawed so that what we and others think we know, we sometimes don’t.

Captives in a strange new world

Tradition reminds us that the loss of innocence is like a rite of passage — an initiation of sorts that is the foundation of mature flourishing. But in the moment, it usually doesn’t feel that way. When adversity happens and steals part of our innocence, we often find ourselves captives in a strange new world, where the familiar still looks the same, but somehow the way we feel about the familiar, and our relationship to it, is suddenly different. It is as if we are alienated from our “normal” world — everyone and everything else is going about life as usual. But for us, “normal” is no more.

Fear of change, fear of the unknown

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you’re heading.” When lost innocence strikes, we often find ourselves longing for and heading back to our innocent past — back to happy days when we didn’t know such pain or worry. The problem is we can’t go back — plain and simple. It’s a tough truth to swallow because the alternative means that we must change direction. Unfortunately, change is not something that comes easy for most of us. Even with profound and paralyzing grief and loss, eventually we realize that we must move.

We cannot re-create our lives going backward. We can only reclaim our lives moving forward.

People struggling with grief and loss — or lost innocence — often experience changes in how they see themselves, others, and the world, especially how they locate in time. Time is something we often take for granted, never realizing how much our perspective can affect how we feel, think, and act. In the face of lost innocence, it’s even easier to overlook.

Aaron Antonovsky, a medical sociologist, developed the concept of sense of coherence (1996), based on the idea that our normal human state is chaos and challenge, rather than stability. Antonovsky defined a sense of coherence as an overarching orientation that expresses the extent to which we can confidently comprehend life in some rational way; confidently manage life in a way that leverages our strengths and available resources; and confidently endure life’s difficult situations because we recognize that our lives have relevance, significance, and value.

Grief Essential Reads

When Children Lose a Loved One

What I Learned From a Week Contemplating My Death

Like Antonovsky’s sense of coherence, Stanford University psychology professor emeritus Philip Zimbardo (2008) believes that our time perspective is not fixed — that we can learn to shift our attention between the past, present, and future depending on a given situation. While both approaches on their own have merit and have proven to be beneficial for individuals’ health and well-being, I want to propose a third approach that leverages and builds off each, but is specifically designed for working through adversity, trauma, and lost innocence. I call it a coherent sense of time (DeMarco, 2024).

Having an incoherent sense of time means that we’re stuck in one frame (past or present or future) — or even two frames; but we are definitely not living in all frames, and so are left disjointed. We fixate on the past, reliving what we had and have lost. Other times we block out the past and avoid the future by escaping into the present. We may tell ourselves we’re taking one day at a time, but then we realize that the mail is still unopened, and the bills are piling up. The future can also become a place to run to; if the past is too painful and the present too hopeless or dangerous, then the future gives us something constructive to work toward — only with all the constant toiling, planning, worrying, and attempts to control it, our restlessness about what we lost never gets reconciled, and we miss out on the small joys of the here and now.

When we have a coherent sense of time, we can see ourselves fully in the past, present, and future, and hold each timeframe with equal value and importance. While there is simply no getting around the fact that meaningful loss, especially the loss of innocence, is absolute, irreducible, and irreplaceable — and no simple cliché, however well intended, can will it away — by honoring the past, transforming the present, and crafting a new future (or HTC, a new model for loss that I developed), we can regain that much-desired sense of wholeness once more.

This article is adapted from the forthcoming Holding Onto Air: The Art and Science of Building a Resilient Spirit.