when i was lost essay

Essay on Day I Got Lost

Students are often asked to write an essay on Day I Got Lost in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Day I Got Lost

Introduction.

One day, I got lost. It was a sunny day and I was out with my family in a big, busy fair. I was so excited by the colorful stalls and fun games that I didn’t notice when I was separated from my family.

The Realization

Suddenly, I looked around and couldn’t find my family. I felt a chill of fear. The fair that seemed so fun and exciting a minute ago, now seemed scary and confusing. I was lost and I didn’t know what to do.

Asking for Help

I remembered what my parents taught me about asking for help. I found a police officer and told him that I was lost. He was kind and said he would help me find my family.

The Reunion

After what seemed like forever, I saw my parents. They were worried but happy to see me. I was relieved and happy too. That day, I learned a valuable lesson about staying close to my family in crowded places.

250 Words Essay on Day I Got Lost

The incident.

We were shopping for groceries. I was excited and started exploring different aisles. I was engrossed in the toy section, looking at a toy car, when I realized my mother was not around. I looked around, but she was nowhere to be seen. I felt a sudden rush of fear and confusion.

I started to panic. I ran through the aisles, calling out for my mother. But the supermarket was loud, and my voice seemed to get lost amid the noise. I felt alone and scared. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I felt like I was in a maze with no way out.

Just when I thought I would never find my mother, a kind store employee found me. I was crying by this point, and the employee quickly comforted me. She asked for my mother’s name and announced it over the store’s loudspeaker.

Soon, my mother came rushing towards me. She hugged me tightly, and I felt a sense of relief wash over me. I was safe and back with my mother. That day, I learned a valuable lesson about staying close to my parents when in public places.

The day I got lost was a scary experience, but it taught me the importance of safety and always being aware of my surroundings.

500 Words Essay on Day I Got Lost

Arrival at the fair.

As we arrived at the fair, I was amazed by the bright colors and the loud music. There were so many people, and everyone seemed happy. My parents allowed me to go on a few rides while they sat on a nearby bench. After enjoying a couple of rides, I decided to go for a walk to explore the fair on my own.

The Moment of Realization

While walking around, I saw a cotton candy stall and decided to buy one. As I turned around to go back to my parents, I realized I couldn’t see them. I looked around but couldn’t find the bench where they were sitting. That’s when it hit me, I was lost. My heart started to beat faster, and I felt a lump in my throat.

Feeling Scared

Seeking help.

I remembered what my parents always told me – if you ever get lost, ask for help. I spotted a lady at a nearby stall and told her I was lost. She comforted me and asked me to stay with her while she called the security.

Reunion with Parents

The security officer used the loudspeaker to announce that a child was lost. Hearing my description, my parents rushed towards the security booth. Seeing them, I ran and hugged them tightly. I was so relieved to see them. I had never been so happy to see my parents before.

Lesson Learned

The day I got lost was a scary experience, but it also taught me a lot. It made me understand the importance of safety and asking for help. Even though it was a day filled with fear and worry, it ended happily. It’s a day I will never forget, not because it was scary, but because of the lessons it taught me.

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Essays About Losing a Loved One: Top 5 Examples

Writing essays about losing a loved one can be challenging; discover our helpful guide with essay examples and writing prompts to help you begin writing. 

One of the most basic facts of life is that it is unpredictable. Nothing on this earth is permanent, and any one of us can pass away in the blink of an eye. But unfortunately, they leave behind many family members and friends who will miss them very much whenever someone dies.

The most devastating news can ruin our best days, affecting us negatively for the next few months and years. When we lose a loved one, we also lose a part of ourselves. Even if the loss can make you feel hopeless at times, finding ways to cope healthily, distract yourself, and move on while still honoring and remembering the deceased is essential.

5 Top Essay Examples

1. losing a loved one by louis barker, 2. personal reflections on coping and loss by adrian furnham , 3. losing my mom helped me become a better parent by trish mann, 4. reflection – dealing with grief and loss by joe joyce.

• 5. ​​Will We Always Hurt on The Anniversary of Losing a Loved One? by Anne Peterson

1. Is Resilience Glorified in Society?

2. how to cope with a loss, 3. reflection on losing a loved one, 4. the stages of grief, 5. the circle of life, 6. how different cultures commemorate losing a loved one.

“I managed to keep my cool until I realized why I was seeing these familiar faces. Once the service started I managed to keep my emotions in tack until I saw my grandmother break down. I could not even look up at her because I thought about how I would feel in the same situation. Your life can change drastically at any moment. Do not take life or the people that you love for granted, you are only here once.”

Barker reflects on how he found out his uncle had passed away. The writer describes the events leading up to the discovery, contrasting the relaxed, cheerful mood and setting that enveloped the house with the feelings of shock, dread, and devastation that he and his family felt once they heard. He also recalls his family members’ different emotions and mannerisms at the memorial service and funeral. 

“Most people like to believe that they live in a just, orderly and stable world where good wins out in the end. But what if things really are random? Counselors and therapists talk about the grief process and grief stages. Given that nearly all of us have experienced major loss and observed it in others, might one expect that people would be relatively sophisticated in helping the grieving?”

Furnham, a psychologist, discusses the stages of grief and proposes six different responses to finding out about one’s loss or suffering: avoidance, brief encounters, miracle cures, real listeners, practical help, and “giving no quarter.” He discusses this in the context of his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis, after which many people displayed these responses. Finally, Furnham mentions the irony that although we have all experienced and observed losing a loved one, no one can help others grieve perfectly.

“When I look in the mirror, I see my mom looking back at me from coffee-colored eyes under the oh-so-familiar crease of her eyelid. She is still here in me. Death does not take what we do not relinquish. I have no doubt she is sitting beside me when I am at my lowest telling me, ‘You can do this. You got this. I believe in you.’”

In Mann’s essay, she tries to see the bright side of her loss; despite the anguish she experienced due to her mother’s passing. Expectedly, she was incredibly depressed and had difficulty accepting that her mom was gone. But, on the other hand, she began to channel her mom into parenting her children, evoking the happy memories they once shared. She is also amused to see the parallels between her and her kids with her and her mother growing up. 

“Now I understood that these feelings must be allowed expression for as long as a person needs. I realized that the “don’t cry” I had spoken on many occasions in the past was not of much help to grieving persons, and that when I had used those words I had been expressing more my own discomfort with feelings of grief and loss than paying attention to the need of mourners to express them.”

Joyce, a priest, writes about the time he witnessed the passing of his cousin on his deathbed. Having experienced this loss right as it happened, he was understandably shaken and realized that all his preachings of “don’t cry” were unrealistic. He compares this instance to a funeral he attended in Pakistan, recalling the importance of letting grief take its course while not allowing it to consume you. 

5. ​​ Will We Always Hurt on The Anniversary of Losing a Loved One? by Anne Peterson

“Death. It’s certain. And we can’t do anything about that. In fact, we are not in control of many of the difficult circumstances of our lives, but we are responsible for how we respond to them. And I choose to honor their memory.”

Peterson discusses how she feels when she has to commemorate the anniversary of losing a loved one. She recalls the tragic deaths of her sister, two brothers, and granddaughter and describes her guilt and anger. Finally, she prays to God, asking him to help her; because of a combination of prayer and self-reflection, she can look back on these times with peace and hope that they will reunite one day. 

6 Thought-Provoking Writing Prompts on Essays About Losing A Loved One

Society tends to praise those who show resilience and strength, especially in times of struggle, such as losing a loved one. However, praising a person’s resilience can prevent them from feeling the pain of loss and grief. This essay explores how glorifying resilience can prevent a person from healing from painful events. Be sure to include examples of this issue in society and your own experiences, if applicable.

Loss is always tricky, especially involving someone close to your heart. Reflect on your personal experiences and how you overcame your grief for an effective essay. Create an essay to guide readers on how to cope with loss. If you can’t pull ideas from your own experiences, research and read other people’s experiences with overcoming loss in life.

If you have experienced losing a loved one, use this essay to describe how it made you feel. Discuss how you reacted to this loss and how it has impacted who you are today. Writing an essay like this may be sensitive for many. If you don’t feel comfortable with this topic, you can write about and analyze the loss of a loved one in a book, movie, or TV show you have seen. 

When we lose a loved one, grief is expected. There are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Discuss each one and how they all connect. You can write a compelling essay by including examples of how the different stages are manifested in books, television, and maybe even your own experiences. 

Death is often regarded as a part of a so-called “circle of life,” most famously shown through the film, The Lion King . In summary, it explains that life goes on and always ends with death. For an intriguing essay topic, reflect on this phrase and discuss what it means to you in the context of losing a loved one. For example, perhaps keeping this in mind can help you cope with the loss. 

Different cultures have different traditions, affected by geography, religion, and history. Funerals are no exception to this; in your essay, research how different cultures honor their deceased and compare and contrast them. No matter how different they may seem, try finding one or two similarities between your chosen traditions. 

If you’d like to learn more, our writer explains how to write an argumentative essay in this guide.For help picking your next essay topic, check out our 20 engaging essay topics about family .

By Patrick Carpen: The Greatest Writer On Earth

The Day I Got Lost – Short Story Writing

Short Story Writing: The Day I Got Lost

When writing a short story, try to spice it up with some funny incidents. They say laughter is the best medicine so give your reader a good dose of it. Include some extraordinary events. Your reader is probably already bored with the monotony of everyday life, and in reading your story, he or she is looking for something interesting, intriguing and exciting. Remember, your story is fiction. Give free reign to your imagination. Let it run loose. But at same time, keep it relatively believable. If your story is completely unbelievable, it will lose its clout.

Here is an example of a good short story entitled, “The Day I Got Lost.”

The Day I Got Lost

At 6:AM, we set out for our adventure. The morning sun was just peeping over the mountain tops, casting its golden rays over the peaceful village of Moco Moco. The bags on our backs were packed heavy with food, clothes and hammocks. We also had our recording equipment ready to do some amazing videos. This was our big day! A trip into the jungle!

Our parents had warned us not to go into the jungle, but we carefully planned for this day when they were all gone to the airport to pick up Uncle Teddy. The plan was that we would be back before 6:pm because they would be back at 11 pm. We would unpack, wash our clothes, bathe and they wouldn’t know a thing!

After about 45 minutes of walking, we entered into the jungle. At the entrance, two huge trees, about 100 feet high, reached into the sky. The floor of the jungle was strewn with fallen leaves that crackled under our feet. The air was cool. It was a beautiful feeling just to stand there.

Rosemary, Floyd, Dexter and I all looked at each other and smiled in amazement. Our hearts were filled with wonder. Just then, we started to get angry at our parents for not allowing us to come here. Look the happiness they were trying to deny us! We thought.

Just then, a magnificent bird flew overhead. Its wings were 6 feet long and had all the colors of the rainbow. Its beak was bigger than Dexter’s head. In a flash, I pulled out my camera and snapped a photo.

We walked a little further. A monkey jumped in the tree above us. It stared at us as though it had never seen a human being in its entire life. We kept walking. We passed a beautiful giraffe. Then a tiger ran by. At first, our hearts raced but the tiger just kept going. Suddenly, we heard a loud roar behind us. We spun around. There, in front of us, stood an ape about 10 feet tall. We froze in terror, but we nearly dropped dead when he ape shouted, “run!”

We had no idea where the energy came from, but we turned and bolted faster than Olympic Athlete Usain Bolt .

It was dark when we stopped running, and we were sure we could never find our way out of this horrible jungle. We huddled in a corner. The night became pitch black. Floyd started to cry. Dexter had fainted and we were afraid he had died. “Don’t cry Floyd,” said Rosemary, hugging him. “The children will laugh at you at school tomorrow.”

“Laugh at him!” I shouted. “If we get out of this jungle alive…they can laugh all they want!” I felt like screaming at the top of my voice.

We waited for hours. We didn’t think of sleeping. We thought we were going to die. I was about to faint when I heard the sound of a helicopter. We saw bright lights flashing through the trees. We got up and waved desperately. The helicopter came down. We ran to it. It was our parents. They were searching for us. They had found us. They hugged us. We boarded the helicopter and flew upwards into the night sky – leaving that scary ape and that mysterious jungle forever behind.

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"Write about a time you felt lost"

Favorite Quote: "Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."

When you feel lost, it’s not the physical sense. It’s not that you’ve taken a wrong turn on some desolate road. When you’re lost, you lose yourself. You lose the person you once were and are replaced by whatever is occupying your mind. I have moved sixteen times, and been to ten different schools. It’s easy to lose yourself when you’re afraid of losing what you’ve just gained. New friends, a new house, and a new outlook upon your own life. I moved to a small town right at the beginning of freshman year. I’ve always known I wasn’t your typical “pretty girl” or “smart girl or “popular girl”. I wasn’t a rebel, an athlete, or artist. I was always stuck in the middle, unsure of where I belonged. Where I lived, everyone was cookie cutter. Smart, athletic, preppy, with a white picket fence and some mixed breed pooch. I entered the school unaware of the strict social cliques and ridged “do’s” and “don’ts” of high school. This is a journal about how I was treated, and how that changed me, how I lost myself in a sea of people who were all sheep. I immediately didn’t fit in. I am about as coordinated as a hippo. Needless to say, sports were not on my agenda. My grades were decent in the English and History departments, but lacking severely in the Math’s and Sciences. My artistic skills are about as detailed as a stick figure on a blank sheet of paper. I didn’t fit the physical mold either. My hair was frizzy, I wore no makeup, and my clothes were a style of my own. Of course, like any cliché high school movie, I got bullied. Mocked, ridiculed, and torn down for being my own person. Everyday I was forced to face people who made me feel like I was not worth anything, simply for being different. So I changed, I changed to be left alone. I changed so people would look at me like I was just another normal teenage girl. I would straighten my hair and wear makeup. I stopped speaking my mind, agreeing with the masses. I lost myself in an attempt to save my own self-esteem. I made myself pretty, or so I thought. Somewhere along the way, I looked in the mirror and realized I didn’t even see myself anymore. I had stopped doing what I loved. I had no passion for writing. I was antisocial and angry. I stopped listening to myself, and I had believed others. The town I lived in was one that stifled originality, and embraced all those who excelled in what was deemed acceptable by my cookie cutter town. I lost myself. I realized from my time in that small town, I was more. I was worth more, I expressed more, I deserved more than to be hurt because of whom I am and what I’m not. Some people can survive in a world where originality is dead, but I cannot. Insecure teenagers trying to raise their own self-confidence cannot shoot down mine because they have none. Maybe a small town, dead end life is acceptable for some people. I refused to lose myself to something so insignificant and so I didn’t.

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When Things Go Missing

A couple of years ago, I spent the summer in Portland, Oregon, losing things. I normally live on the East Coast, but that year, unable to face another sweltering August, I decided to temporarily decamp to the West. This turned out to be strangely easy. I’d lived in Portland for a while after college, and some acquaintances there needed a house sitter. Another friend was away for the summer and happy to loan me her pickup truck. Someone on Craigslist sold me a bike for next to nothing. In very short order, and with very little effort, everything fell into place.

And then, mystifyingly, everything fell out of place. My first day in town, I left the keys to the truck on the counter of a coffee shop. The next day, I left the keys to the house in the front door. A few days after that, warming up in the midday sun at an outdoor café, I took off the long-sleeved shirt I’d been wearing, only to leave it hanging over the back of the chair when I headed home. When I returned to claim it, I discovered that I’d left my wallet behind as well. Prior to that summer, I should note, I had lost a wallet exactly once in my adult life: at gunpoint. Yet later that afternoon I stopped by a sporting-goods store to buy a lock for my new bike and left my wallet sitting next to the cash register.

I got the wallet back, but the next day I lost the bike lock. I’d just arrived home and removed it from its packaging when my phone rang; I stepped away to take the call, and when I returned, some time later, the lock had vanished. This was annoying, because I was planning to bike downtown that evening, to attend an event at Powell’s, Portland’s famous bookstore. Eventually, having spent an absurd amount of time looking for the lock and failing to find it, I gave up and drove the truck downtown instead. I parked, went to the event, hung around talking for a while afterward, browsed the bookshelves, walked outside into a lovely summer evening, and could not find the truck anywhere.

This was a serious feat, a real bar-raising of thing-losing, not only because in general it is difficult to lose a truck but also because the truck in question was enormous. The friend to whom it belonged once worked as an ambulance driver; oversized vehicles do not faze her. It had tires that came up to my midriff, an extended cab, and a bed big enough to haul cetaceans. Yet I’d somehow managed to misplace it in downtown Portland—a city, incidentally, that I know as well as any other on the planet. For the next forty-five minutes, as a cool blue night gradually lowered itself over downtown, I walked around looking for the truck, first on the street where I was sure I’d parked, then on the nearest cross streets, and then in a grid whose scale grew ever larger and more ludicrous.

Finally, I returned to the street where I’d started and noticed a small sign: “ No Parking Anytime .” Oh, shit. Feeling like the world’s biggest idiot, and wondering how much it was going to cost to extricate a truck the size of Nevada from a tow lot, I called the Portland Police Department. The man who answered was wonderfully affable. “No, Ma’am,” he veritably sang into the phone, “no pickup trucks from downtown this evening. Must be your lucky day!” Officer, you have no idea. Channelling the kind of advice one is often given as a child, I returned to the bookstore, calmed myself down with a cup of tea, collected my thoughts amid the latest literary débuts, and then, to the best of my ability, retraced the entire course of my evening, in the hope that doing so would knock loose some memory of how I got there. It did not. Back outside on the streets of Portland, I spun around as uselessly as a dowsing rod.

Seventy-five minutes later, I found the truck, in a perfectly legal parking space, on a block so unrelated to any reasonable route from my house to the bookstore that I seriously wondered if I’d driven there in some kind of fugue state. I climbed in, headed home, and, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, decided that I needed to call my sister as soon as I walked in the door. But I did not. I could not. My cell phone was back at Powell’s, on a shelf with all the other New Arrivals.

My sister is a cognitive scientist at M.I.T., more conversant than most people in the mental processes involved in tracking and misplacing objects. That is not, however, why I wanted to talk to her about my newly acquired propensity for losing things. I wanted to talk to her because, true to the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, she is the most scatterbrained person I’ve ever met.

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There is a runner-up: my father. My family members, otherwise a fairly similar bunch, are curiously divided down the middle in this respect. On the spectrum of obsessively orderly to sublimely unconcerned with the everyday physical world, my father and my sister are—actually, they are nowhere. They can’t even find the spectrum. My mother and I, meanwhile, are busy organizing it by size and color. I will never forget watching my mother try to adjust an ever so slightly askew picture frame—at the Cleveland Museum of Art. My father, by contrast, once spent an entire vacation wearing mismatched shoes, because he’d packed no others and discovered the mistake only when airport security asked him to remove them. My sister’s best T.S.A. trick, meanwhile, involved borrowing her partner’s laptop, then accidentally leaving it at an Alaska Airlines gate one week after 9/11, thereby almost shutting down the Oakland airport.

That’s why I called her when I started uncharacteristically misplacing stuff myself. For one thing, I thought she might commiserate. For another, I thought she might help; given her extensive experience with losing things, I figured she must have developed a compensatory capacity for finding them. Once I recovered my phone and reached her, however, both hopes vanished as completely as the bike lock. My sister was gratifyingly astonished that I’d never lost my wallet before, but, as someone who typically has to reconstruct the entire contents of her own several times a year, she was not exactly sympathetic. “Call me,” she said, “when they know your name at the D.M.V.”

Nor did my sister have any good advice on how to find missing objects—although, in fairness, such advice is itself difficult to find. Plenty of parents, self-help gurus, and psychics will offer to assist you in finding lost stuff, but most of their suggestions are either obvious (calm down, clean up), suspect (the “eighteen-inch rule,” whereby the majority of missing items are supposedly lurking less than two feet from where you first thought they would be), or New Agey. (“Picture a silvery cord reaching from your chest all the way out to your lost object.”) Advice on how to find missing things also abounds online, but as a rule it is useful only in proportion to the strangeness of whatever you’ve lost. Thus, the Internet is middling on your lost credit card or Kindle, but edifying on your lost Roomba (look inside upholstered furniture), your lost marijuana (your high self probably hid it in a fit of paranoia; try your sock drawer), your lost drone (you’ll need a specially designed G.P.S.), or your lost bitcoins (good luck with that). The same basic dynamic applies to the countless Web sites devoted to recovering lost pets, which are largely useless when it comes to your missing Lab mix but surprisingly helpful when it comes to your missing ball python. Such Web sites can also be counted on for excellent anecdotes, like the one about the cat that vanished in Nottinghamshire, England, and was found, fourteen months later, in a pet-food warehouse, twice its original size.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about lost entities and the Internet is that it has made many of them considerably easier to find: out-of-print books, elementary-school classmates, decades-old damning quotes by politicians. More generally, modern technology can sometimes help us find misplaced objects, as you know if you’ve ever had your girlfriend call your lost cell phone, or used that little button on your keys to make your Toyota Camry honk at you. Lately, we’ve seen a boom in technologies specifically designed to compensate for our tendency to lose stuff: Apple’s Find My iPhone, for instance, and the proliferation of Bluetooth-enabled tracking devices that you can attach to everyday objects in order to summon them from the ether, like the Accio spell in the “Harry Potter” books.

These tricks, while helpful, have their limitations. Your phone needs to be on and non-dead; your car needs to be within range; you need to have the foresight to stick a tracking device onto the particular thing you’re going to lose before you’ve lost it. Moreover, as anyone who’s ever owned a remote control can tell you, new technologies themselves are often infuriatingly unfindable, a problem made worse by the trend toward ever smaller gadgets. It is difficult to lose an Apple IIe, easier to lose a laptop, a snap to lose a cell phone, and nearly impossible not to lose a flash drive. Then, there is the issue of passwords, which are to computers what socks are to washing machines. The only thing in the real or the digital world harder to keep track of than a password is the information required to retrieve it, which is why it is possible, as a grown adult, to find yourself caring about your first-grade teacher’s pet iguana’s maiden name.

Passwords, passports, umbrellas, scarves, earrings, earbuds, musical instruments, W-2s, that letter you meant to answer, the permission slip for your daughter’s field trip, the can of paint you scrupulously set aside three years ago for the touch-up job you knew you’d someday need: the range of things we lose and the readiness with which we do so are staggering. Data from one insurance-company survey suggest that the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, which means that, by the time we turn sixty, we will have lost up to two hundred thousand things. (These figures seem preposterous until you reflect on all those times you holler up the stairs to ask your partner if she’s seen your jacket, or on how often you search the couch cushions for the pen you were just using, or on that daily almost-out-the-door flurry when you can’t find your kid’s lunchbox or your car keys.) Granted, you’ll get many of those items back, but you’ll never get back the time you wasted looking for them. In the course of your life, you’ll spend roughly six solid months looking for missing objects; here in the United States, that translates to, collectively, some fifty-four million hours spent searching a day . And there’s the associated loss of money: in the U.S. in 2011, thirty billion dollars on misplaced cell phones alone.

Broadly speaking, there are two explanations for why we lose all this stuff—one scientific, the other psychoanalytic, both unsatisfying. According to the scientific account, losing things represents a failure of recollection or a failure of attention: either we can’t retrieve a memory (of where we set down our wallet, say) or we didn’t encode one in the first place. According to the psychoanalytic account, conversely, losing things represents a success —a deliberate sabotage of our rational mind by our subliminal desires. In “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Freud describes “the unconscious dexterity with which an object is mislaid on account of hidden but powerful motives,” including “the low estimation in which the lost object is held, or a secret antipathy towards it or towards the person that it came from.” Freud’s colleague and contemporary Abraham Arden Brill put the matter more succinctly: “We never lose what we highly value.”

As explanations go, the scientific one is persuasive but uninteresting. It sheds no light on how it feels to lose something, and provides only the most abstract and impractical notion of how not to do so. (Focus! And, while you’re at it, rejigger your genes or circumstances to improve your memory.) The psychological account, by contrast, is interesting, entertaining, and theoretically helpful (Freud pointed out “the remarkable sureness shown in finding the object again once the motive for its being mislaid had expired”) but, alas, untrue. The most charitable thing to be said about it is that it wildly overestimates our species: absent subconscious motives, apparently, we would never lose anything at all.

That is patently false—but, like many psychological claims, impossible to actually falsify. Maybe the doting mother who lost her toddler at the mall was secretly fed up with the demands of motherhood. Maybe my sister loses her wallet so often owing to a deep-seated discomfort with capitalism. Maybe the guy who left his “Hamilton” tickets in the taxi was a Jeffersonian at heart. Freud would stand by such propositions, and no doubt some losses really are occasioned by subconscious emotion, or at least can be convincingly explained that way after the fact. But experience tells us that such cases are unusual, if they exist at all. The better explanation, most of the time, is simply that life is complicated and minds are limited. We lose things because we are flawed; because we are human; because we have things to lose.

Of all the lost objects in literature, one of my favorites appears—or, rather, disappears—in Patti Smith’s 2015 memoir, “M Train.” Although that book is ultimately concerned with far more serious losses, Smith pauses midway through to describe the experience of losing a beloved black coat that a friend gave her, off his own back, on her fifty-seventh birthday. The coat wasn’t much to look at—moth-eaten, coming apart at the seams, itself optimized for losing things by the gaping holes in each pocket—but, Smith writes, “Every time I put it on I felt like myself.” Then came a particularly harsh winter, which required a warmer jacket, and by the time the air turned mild again the coat was nowhere to be seen.

When we lose something, our first reaction, naturally enough, is to want to know where it is. But behind that question about location lurks a question about causality: What happened to it? What agent or force made it disappear? Such questions matter because they can help direct our search. You will act differently if you think you left your coat in a taxi or believe you boxed it up and put it in the basement. Just as important, the answers can provide us with that much coveted condition known as closure. It is good to get your keys back, better still to understand how they wound up in your neighbor’s recycling bin.

But questions about causality can also lead to trouble, because, in essence, they ask us to assign blame. Being human, we’re often reluctant to assign it to ourselves—and when it comes to missing possessions it is always possible (and occasionally true) that someone else caused them to disappear. This is how a problem with an object turns into a problem with a person. You swear you left the bill sitting on the table for your wife to mail; your wife swears with equal vehemence that it was never there; soon enough, you have also both lost your tempers.

Another possibility, considerably less likely but equally self-sparing, is that your missing object engineered its own vanishing, alone or in conjunction with other occult forces. Beloved possessions like her black coat, Patti Smith suggests, are sometimes “drawn into that half-dimensional place where things just disappear.” Such explanations are more common than you might think. Given enough time spent searching for something that was just there , even the most scientifically inclined person on the planet will start positing various highly improbable culprits: wormholes, aliens, goblins, ether.

That is an impressive act of outsourcing, given that nine times out of ten we are to blame for losing whatever it is that we can’t find. In the micro-drama of loss, in other words, we are nearly always both villain and victim. That goes some way toward explaining why people often say that losing things drives them crazy. At best, our failure to locate something that we ourselves last handled suggests that our memory is shot; at worst, it calls into question the very nature and continuity of selfhood. (If you’ve ever lost something that you deliberately stashed away for safekeeping, you know that the resulting frustration stems not just from a failure of memory but from a failure of inference. As one astute Internet commentator asked, “Why is it so hard to think like myself?”) Part of what makes loss such a surprisingly complicated phenomenon, then, is that it is inextricable from the extremely complicated phenomenon of human cognition.

This entanglement becomes more fraught as we grow older. Beyond a certain age, every act of losing gets subjected to an extra layer of scrutiny, in case what you have actually lost is your mind. Most such acts don’t indicate pathology, of course, but real mental decline does manifest partly as an uptick in lost things. Dementia patients are prone to misplacing their belongings, and people with early-stage Alzheimer’s often can’t find objects because they have put them in unlikely locations; the eyeglasses end up in the oven, the dentures in the coffee can. Such losses sadden us because they presage larger ones—of autonomy, of intellectual capacity, ultimately of life itself.

No wonder losing things, even trivial things, can be so upsetting. Regardless of what goes missing, loss puts us in our place; it confronts us with lack of order and loss of control and the fleeting nature of existence. When Patti Smith gives up on finding her black coat, she imagines that, together with all of the world’s other missing objects, it has gone to dwell in a place her husband liked to call the Valley of Lost Things. The shadow that is missing from that phrase darkens her memoir; in the course of it, Smith also describes losing her best friend, her brother, her mother, and that husband (at age forty-five, to heart failure).

On the face of it, such losses fit in poorly with lesser ones. It is one thing to lose a wedding ring, something else entirely to lose a spouse. This is the distinction Elizabeth Bishop illuminates, by pretending to elide it, in her villanelle “One Art,” perhaps the most famous reckoning with loss in all of literature. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” she writes in the opening line; the trick is to begin with trivial losses, like door keys, and practice until you can handle those which are tragic. No one could take this suggestion seriously, and we aren’t meant to do so. Through its content as well as its form, the poem ultimately concedes that all other losses pale beside the loss of a loved one.

Moreover, although Bishop doesn’t make this point explicitly, death differs from other losses not only in degree but in kind. With objects, loss implies the possibility of recovery; in theory, at least, nearly every missing possession can be restored to its owner. That’s why the defining emotion of losing things isn’t frustration or panic or sadness but, paradoxically, hope. With people, by contrast, loss is not a transitional state but a terminal one. Outside of an afterlife, for those who believe in one, it leaves us with nothing to hope for and nothing to do. Death is loss without the possibility of being found.

My father, in addition to being scatterbrained and mismatched and menschy and brilliant, is dead. I lost him, as we say, in the third week of September, just before the autumn equinox. Since then, the days have darkened, and I, too, have been lost: adrift, disoriented, absent. Or perhaps it would be more apt to say that I have been at a loss —a strange turn of phrase, as if loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle spins.

Like death more generally, my father’s was somehow both predictable and shocking. For nearly a decade, his health had been poor, almost impressively so. In addition to suffering from many of the usual complaints of contemporary aging (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, kidney disease, congestive heart failure), he had endured illnesses unusual for any age and era: viral meningitis, West Nile encephalitis, an autoimmune disorder whose identity evaded the best doctors at the Cleveland Clinic. From there, the list spread outward in all directions of physiology and severity. He had fallen and torn a rotator cuff beyond recovery, and obliterated a patellar tendon by missing a step one Fourth of July. His breathing was often labored despite no evident respiratory problem; an errant nerve in his neck sometimes zapped him into temporary near-paralysis. He had terrible dental issues, like the impoverished child he had once been, and terrible gout, like the wealthy old potentate he cheerfully became.

He was, in short, a shambles. And yet, as the E.R. visits added up over the years, I gradually curbed my initial feelings of panic and dread—partly because no one can live in a state of crisis forever but also because, by and large, my father bore his infirmity with insouciance. (“Biopsy Thursday,” he once wrote me about a problem with his carotid artery. “Have no idea when the autopsy will be and may not be informed of it.”) More to the point, against considerable odds, he just kept on being alive. Intellectually, I knew that no one could manage such a serious disease burden forever. Yet the sheer number of times my father had courted death and then recovered had, perversely, made him seem indomitable.

As a result, I was not overly alarmed when my mother called one morning toward the end of the summer to say that my father had been hospitalized with a bout of atrial fibrillation. Nor was I surprised, when my partner and I got to town that night, to learn that his heart rhythm had stabilized. The doctors were keeping him in the hospital chiefly for observation, they told us, and also because his white-bloodcell count was mysteriously high. When my father related the chain of events to us—he had gone to a routine cardiology appointment, only to be shunted straight to the I.C.U.—he was jovial and accurate and eminently himself. He remained in good spirits the following day, although he was extremely garrulous, not in his usual effusive way but slightly manic, slightly off—a consequence, the doctors explained, of toxins building up in his bloodstream from temporary loss of kidney function. If it didn’t resolve on its own in a day or two, they planned to give him a round of dialysis to clear it.

That was on a Wednesday. Over the next two days, the garrulousness declined into incoherence; then, on Saturday, my father lapsed into unresponsiveness. Somewhere below his silence lurked six languages, the result of being born in Tel Aviv to parents who had fled pogroms in Poland, relocating at age seven to Germany (an unusual reverse exodus for a family of Jews in 1948, precipitated by limited travel options and violence in what was then still Palestine), and arriving in the United States, on a refugee visa, at the age of twelve. English, French, German, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew: of these, my father acquired the first one last, and spoke it with Nabokovian fluency and panache. He loved to talk—I mean that he found just putting sentences together tremendously fun, although he also cherished conversation—and he talked his way into, out of, and through everything, including illness. During the years of medical crises, I had seen my father racked and raving with fever. I had seen him in a dozen kinds of pain. I had seen him hallucinating—sometimes while fully aware of it, discussing with us not only the mystery of his visions but also the mystery of cognition. I had seen him cast about in a mind temporarily compromised by illness and catch only strange, dark, pelagic creatures, unknown and fearsome to the rest of us. In all that time, under all those varied conditions, I had never known him to lack for words. But now, for five days, he held his silence. On the sixth, he lurched back into sound, but not into himself; there followed an awful night of struggle and agitation. After that, aside from a few scattered words, some mystifying, some seemingly lucid—“Hi!”; “Machu Picchu”; “I’m dying”—my father never spoke again.

Even so, for a while longer, he endured—I mean his him-ness, his Isaac-ness, that inexplicable, assertive bit of self in each of us. A few days before his death, having ignored every request made of him by a constant stream of medical professionals (“Mr. Schulz, can you wiggle your toes?” “Mr. Schulz, can you squeeze my hand?”), my father chose to respond to one final command: Mr. Schulz, we learned, could still stick out his tongue. His last voluntary movement, which he retained almost until the end, was the ability to kiss my mother. Whenever she leaned in close to brush his lips, he puckered up and returned the same brief, adoring gesture that I had seen all my days. In front of my sister and me, at least, it was my parents’ hello and goodbye, their “Sweet dreams” and “I’m only teasing,” their “I’m sorry” and “You’re beautiful” and “I love you”—the basic punctuation mark of their common language, the sign and seal of fifty years of happiness.

One night, while that essence still persisted, we gathered around, my father’s loved ones, and filled his silence with talk. I had always regarded my family as close, so it was startling to realize how much closer we could get, how near we drew around his dying flame. The room we were in was a cube of white, lit up like the aisle of a grocery store, yet in my memory that night is as dark and vibrant as a Rembrandt painting. We talked only of love; there was nothing else to say. My father, mute but alert, looked from one face to the next as we spoke, eyes shining with tears. I had always dreaded seeing him cry, and rarely did, but for once I was grateful. It told me what I needed to know: for what may have been the last time in his life, and perhaps the most important, he understood.

All this makes dying sound meaningful and sweet—and it is true that, if you are lucky, there is a seam of sweetness and meaning to be found within it, a vein of silver in a dark cave a thousand feet underground. Still, the cave is a cave. We had by then spent two vertiginous, elongated, atemporal weeks in the I.C.U. At no point during that time did we have a diagnosis, still less a prognosis. At every point, we were besieged with new possibilities, new tests, new doctors, new hopes, new fears. Every night, we arrived home exhausted, many hours past dark, and talked through what had happened, as if doing so might guide us through the following day. Then we’d wake up and resume the routine of the parking garage and the elevator and the twenty-four-hour Au Bon Pain, only to discover that, beyond those, there was no routine at all, nothing to help us prepare or plan. It was like trying to dress every morning for the weather in a nation we’d never heard of.

Eventually, we decided that my father would not recover, and so, instead of continuing to try to stave off death, we unbarred the door and began to wait. To my surprise, I found it comforting to be with him during that time, to sit by his side and hold his hand and watch his chest rise and fall with a familiar little riffle of snore. It was not, as they say, unbearably sad; on the contrary, it was bearably sad—a tranquil, contemplative, lapping kind of sorrow. I thought, as it turns out mistakenly, that what I was doing during those days was making my peace with his death. I have learned since then that even one’s unresponsive and dying father is, in some extremely salient way, still alive. And then, very early one morning, he was not.

What I remember best from those next hours is watching my mother cradle the top of my father’s head in her hand. A wife holding her dead husband, without trepidation, without denial, without any possibility of being cared for in return, just for the chance to be tender toward him one last time: it was the purest act of love I’ve ever seen. She looked bereft, beautiful, unimaginably calm. He did not yet look dead. He looked like my father. I could not stop picturing the way he used to push his glasses up onto his forehead to read. It struck me, right before everything else struck me much harder, that I should set them by his bed in case he needed them.

So began my second, darker season of losing things. Three weeks after my father died, so did another family member, of cancer. Three weeks after that, my home-town baseball team lost the World Series—an outcome that wouldn’t have affected me much if my father hadn’t been such an ardent fan. One week later, Hillary Clinton, together with sixty-six million voters, lost the Presidential election.

Like a dysfunctional form of love, which to some extent it is, grief has no boundaries; seldom this fall could I distinguish my distress over these later losses from my sadness about my father. I had maintained my composure during his memorial service, even while delivering the eulogy. But when, at the second funeral, the son of the deceased stood up to speak, I wept. Afterward, I couldn’t shake the sense that another shoe was about to drop—that at any moment I would learn that someone else close to me had died. The morning after the election, I cried again, missing my refugee father, missing the future I had thought would unfold. In its place, other kinds of losses suddenly seemed imminent: of civil rights, personal safety, financial security, the foundational American values of respect for dissent and difference, the institutions and protections of democracy.

For weeks, I slogged on like this, through waves of actual and anticipatory grief. I couldn’t stop conjuring catastrophes, political and otherwise. I felt a rising fear whenever my mother didn’t answer her phone, hated to see my sister board an airplane, could barely let my partner get in a car. “So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote, and, as much as my specific sadness, it was just that—the sheer quantity and inevitability of further suffering—that undid me.

Meanwhile, I had lost, along with everything else, all motivation; day after day, I did as close as humanly possible to nothing. In part, this was because I dreaded getting farther away from the time when my father was still alive. But it was also because, after all the obvious tasks of mourning were completed—the service over, the bureaucratic side of death dispatched, the clothing donated, the thank-you cards written—I had no idea what else to do. Although I had spent a decade worrying about losing my father, I had never once thought about what would come next. Like a heart, my imagination had always stopped at the moment of death.

Now, obliged to carry onward through time, I realized I didn’t know how. I found some consolation in poetry, but otherwise, for the first time in my life, I did not care to read. Nor could I bring myself to write, not least because any piece I produced would be the first my father wouldn’t see. I stretched out for as long as I could the small acts that felt easy and right (calling my mother and my sister, curling up with my partner, playing with the cats), but these alone could not occupy the days. Not since the age of eight, when I was still learning to master boredom, had life struck me so much as simply a problem of what to do.

It was during this time that I began to go out looking for my father. Some days, I merely said to myself that I wanted to get out of the house; other days, I set about searching for him as deliberately as one would go look for a missing glove. Because I find peace and clarity in nature, I did this searching outdoors, sometimes while walking, sometimes while out on a run. I did not expect, of course, that along the way I would encounter my father again in his physical form. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I thought that through sheer motion I might be able to create a tunnel of emptiness, in myself or in the world, that would fill up with a sense of his presence—his voice, his humor, his warmth, the perfect familiarity of our relationship.

I have subsequently learned, from the academic literature on grief, that this “searching behavior,” as it is called, is common among the bereaved. The psychologist John Bowlby, a contemporary of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, regarded the second stage of grief, after numbness, as “yearning and searching.” But I had never knowingly engaged in it before, because, in my experience, my dead had always come looking for me . After other people I’d loved had died, I had often felt them near me, sometimes heard their voices, and even, on a few exceedingly strange occasions, been jolted into the uncanny conviction that I had encountered them again in some altered but unmistakable form. (This, too, turns out to be common among the grieving. “I never thought Michiko would come back / after she died,” the poet Jack Gilbert wrote of his wife in “Alone.” “It is strange that she has returned / as somebody’s dalmatian.”)

These experiences, to be clear, do not comport with my understanding of death. I don’t believe that our loved ones can commune with us from beyond the grave, any more than I believe that spouses occasionally reincarnate as Dalmatians. But grief makes reckless cosmologists of us all, and I had thought it possible, in an impossible kind of way, that if I went out looking I might find myself in my father’s company again.

The first time, I turned around after five minutes; I have seldom tried anything that felt so futile. After he lost his wife, C. S. Lewis, who had likewise previously felt the dead to be near at hand, looked up at the night sky and, to his dismay, knew that he would never find her anywhere. “Is anything more certain,” he wrote, in “A Grief Observed,” “than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?” Between his late wife and himself, he felt only “the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero.”

Thus do I feel about my father. “Lost” is precisely the right description for how I have experienced him since his death. I search for him constantly but can’t find him anywhere. I try to sense some intimation of his presence and feel nothing. I listen for his voice but haven’t heard it since those final times he used it in the hospital. Grieving him is like holding one of those homemade tin-can telephones with no tin can on the other end of the string. His absence is total; where there was him, there is nothing.

This was perhaps the most striking thing about my father’s death and all that followed: how relevant the idea of loss felt, how it seemed at once so capacious and so accurate. And in fact, to my surprise, it was accurate. Until I looked it up, I’d assumed that, unless we were talking about phone chargers or car keys or cake recipes, we were using the word “lost” figuratively, even euphemistically—that we say “I lost my father” to soften the blow of death.

But that turns out not to be true. The verb “to lose” has its taproot sunk in sorrow; it is related to the “lorn” in forlorn. It comes from an Old English word meaning to perish, which comes from a still more ancient word meaning to separate or cut apart. The modern sense of misplacing an object appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, “to lose” acquired the meaning of failing to win. In the sixteenth century, we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and one another and has been steadily expanding ever since. In consequence, loss today is a supremely awkward category, bulging with everything from mittens to life savings to loved ones, forcing into relationship all kinds of wildly dissimilar experiences.

And yet, if anything, our problem is not that we put too many things into the category of loss but that we leave too many out. One night, during those weeks when I could find solace only in poetry, my partner read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” aloud to me. In it, Walt Whitman leans against the railing of a ship, exalting in all he sees. So expansive is his vision that it includes not just the piers and sails and reeling gulls but everyone else who makes the crossing: all those who stood at the railing watching before his birth, all those watching around him now, and all those who will be there watching after his death—which, in the poem, he doesn’t so much foresee as, through a wild, craning omniscience, look back on. “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,” he admonishes, kindly.

And, just like that, my sense of loss suddenly revealed itself as terribly narrow. What I miss about my father, as much as anything, is life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights. Yet the most important thing that vanished when he died is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to him, life as we all live it, from the inside out. All my memories can’t add up to a single moment of what it was like to be my father, and all my loss pales beside his own. Like Whitman, his love of life had been exuberant, exhaustive; he must have hated, truly hated, to leave it behind—not just his family, whom he adored, but all of it, sea to shining sea.

It is breathtaking, the extinguishing of consciousness. Yet that loss, too—our own ultimate unbeing—is dwarfed by the grander scheme. When we are experiencing it, loss often feels like an anomaly, a disruption in the usual order of things. In fact, though, it is the usual order of things. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories, the childhood friend, the husband of fifty years, the father of forever, the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.

There’s precious little solace for this, and zero redress; we will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.

All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence. No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep. ♦

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Literature Review — The Experience of Loss and Grief in Poetry

The Experience of Loss and Grief in Poetry

• Categories: Grief Literature Review

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Words: 819 |

Published: Jun 5, 2019

Words: 819 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Works Cited

• Bishop, E. (1976). One Art. In The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (pp. 130-131). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Frost, R. (1995). Nothing Gold Can Stay. In The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged (pp. 73). Holt Paperbacks.
• Karolides, N. J. (Ed.). (2011). The Poetry for Students Volume 39: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry. Gale.
• Lentricchia, F., & McLaughlin, T. (Eds.). (2010). Critical Terms for Literary Study (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.
• Millay, E. S. (2000). The Courage That My Mother Had. In Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems (pp. 45). Modern Library.
• Plath, S. (2004). The Collected Poems. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
• Rosenblatt, R. (1995). Literature as Exploration (4th ed.). Modern Language Association of America.
• Vendler, H. (2003). Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. Bedford/St. Martin's.
• Williams, W. C. (1999). Selected Poems (Revised Edition). New Directions.
• Wimsatt, W. K., & Brooks, C. (1995). Literary Criticism: A Short History. University of Chicago Press.

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Dear Therapist Writes to Herself in Her Grief

My father died, there’s a pandemic, and I’m overcome by my feeling of loss.

Dear Therapist,

I know that everyone is going through loss during the coronavirus pandemic, but in the midst of all this, my beloved father died two weeks ago, and I’m reeling.

He was 85 years old and in great pain from complications due to congestive heart failure. After years of invasive procedures and frequent hospitalizations, he decided to go into home hospice to live out the rest of his life surrounded by family. We didn’t know whether it would be weeks or months, but we expected his death, and had prepared for it in the time leading up to it. We had the conversations we wanted to have, and the day he died, I was there to kiss his cheeks and massage his forehead, to hold his hand and say goodbye. I was at his bedside when he took his last breath.

And yet, nothing prepared me for this loss. Can you help me understand my grief?

Lori Los Angeles, Calif.

Dear Readers,

This week, I decided to submit my own “Dear Therapist” letter following my father’s death. As a therapist, I’m no stranger to grief, and I’ve written about its varied manifestations in this column many times .

Even so, I wanted to write about the grief I’m now experiencing personally, because I know this is something that affects everyone. You can’t get through life without experiencing loss. The question is, how do we live with loss?

In the months before my father died, I asked him a version of that question: How will I live without you? If this sounds strange—asking a person you love to give you tips on how to grieve his death—let me offer some context.

My dad was a phenomenal father, grandfather, husband, and loyal friend to many. He had a dry sense of humor, a hearty laugh, boundless compassion, an uncanny ability to fix anything around the house, and a deep knowledge of the world (he was my Siri before there was a Siri). Mostly, though, he was known for his emotional generosity. He cared deeply about others; when we returned to my mom’s house after his burial, we were greeted by a gigantic box of paper towels on her doorstep, ordered by my father the day before he died so that she wouldn’t have to worry about going out during the pandemic.

His greatest act of emotional generosity, though, was talking me through my grief. He said many comforting things in recent months—how I’ll carry him inside me, how my memories of him will live forever, how he believes in my resilience. A few years earlier, he had taken me aside after one of my son’s basketball games and said that he’d just been to a friend’s funeral, told the friend’s adult daughter how proud her father had been of her, and was heartbroken when she said her father had never said that to her.

“So,” my father said outside the gym, “I want to make sure that I’ve told you how proud of you I am. I want to make sure you know.” It was the first time we’d had a conversation like that, and the subtext was clear: I’m going to die sooner rather than later. We stood there, the two of us, hugging and crying as people passing by tried not to stare, because we both knew that this was the beginning of my father’s goodbye.

But of all the ways my father tried to prepare me for his loss, what has stayed with me most was when he talked about what he learned from grieving his own parents’ deaths: that grief was unavoidable, and that I would grieve this loss forever.

“I can’t make this less painful for you,” he said one night when I started crying over the idea—still so theoretical to me—of his death. “But when you feel the pain, remember that it comes from a place of having loved and been loved deeply.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Beyond that—you’re the therapist. Think about how you’ve helped other people with their grief.”

So I have. Five days before he died, I developed a cough that would wake me from sleep. I didn’t have the other symptoms of COVID-19—fever, fatigue—but still, I thought: I’d better not go near Dad . I spoke with him every day, as usual, except for Saturday, when time got away from me. I called the next day—the day when suddenly he could barely talk and all we could say was “I love you” to each other before he lost consciousness. He never said another word; our family sat vigil until he died the next afternoon.

Afterward, I was racked with guilt. While I’d told myself that I hadn’t seen him in his last days because of my cough, and that I hadn’t called Saturday because of the upheaval of getting supplies for the lockdown, maybe I wasn’t there and didn’t call because I was in denial—I couldn’t tolerate the idea of him dying, so I found a way to avoid confronting it.

Soon this became all I thought about—how I wished I’d gone over with my cough and a mask; how I wished I’d called on Saturday when he was still cogent—until I remembered something I wrote in this column to a woman who felt guilty about the way she had treated her dying husband in his last week. “One way to deal with intense grief is to focus the pain elsewhere,” I had written then. “It might be easier to distract yourself from the pain of missing your husband by turning the pain inward and beating yourself up over what you did or didn’t do for him.”

Like my father, her husband had suffered for a long time, and like her, I felt I had failed him in his final days.

I wrote to her:

Grief doesn’t begin the day a person dies. We experience the loss while the person is alive, and because our energy is focused on doctor appointments and tests and treatments—and because the person is still here—we might not be aware that we’ve already begun grieving the loss of someone we love … So what happens to their feelings of helplessness, sadness, fear, or rage? It’s not uncommon for people with a terminally ill partner to push their partner away in order to protect themselves from the pain of the loss they’re already experiencing and the bigger one they’re about to endure. They might pick fights with their partner … They might avoid their partner, and busy themselves with other interests or people. They might not be as helpful as they had imagined they would be, not only because of the exhaustion that sets in during these situations, but also because of the resentment: How dare you show me so much love, even in your suffering, and then leave me .

Another “Dear Therapist” letter came to mind this week, this one from a man grieving the loss of his wife of 47 years . He wanted to know how long this would go on. I replied:

Many people don’t know that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s well-known stages of grieving—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—were conceived in the context of terminally ill patients coming to terms with their own deaths … It’s one thing to “accept” the end of your own life. But for those who keep on living, the idea that they should reach “acceptance” might make them feel worse (“I should be past this by now”; “I don’t know why I still cry at random times, all these years later”) … The grief psychologist William Worden looks at grieving in this light, replacing “stages” with “tasks” of mourning. In the fourth of his tasks, the goal is to integrate the loss into our lives and create an ongoing connection with the person who died—while also finding a way to continue living.

Just like my father suggested, these columns helped. And so did my own therapist, the person I called Wendell in my recent book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone . He sat with me (from a coronavirus-safe distance, of course) as I tried to minimize my grief— look at all of these relatively young people dying from the coronavirus when my father got to live to 85 ; look at the all the people who weren’t lucky enough to have a father like mine —and he reminded me that I always tell others that there’s no hierarchy of pain, that pain is pain and not a contest.

And so I stopped apologizing for my pain and shared it with Wendell. I told him how, after my father died and we were waiting for his body to be taken to the mortuary, I kissed my father’s cheek, knowing that it would be the last time I would ever kiss him, and I noticed how soft and warm his cheek still was, and I tried to remember what he felt like, because I knew I would never feel my father’s skin again. I told Wendell how I stared at my father’s face and tried to memorize every detail, knowing it would be the last time I’d ever see the face I’d looked at my entire life. I told him how gutted I was by the physical markers that jolted me out of denial and made this goodbye so horribly real—seeing my father’s lifeless body being wrapped in a sheet and placed in a van ( Wait, where are you taking my dad? I silently screamed), carrying the casket to the hearse, shoveling dirt into his grave, watching the shiva candle melt for seven days until the flame was jarringly gone. Mostly, though, I cried, deep and guttural, the way my patients do when they’re in the throes of grief.

Since leaving Wendell’s office, I have cried and also laughed. I’ve felt pain and joy; I’ve felt numb and alive. I’ve lost track of the days, and found purpose in helping people through our global pandemic. I’ve hugged my son, also reeling from the loss of his grandfather, tighter than usual, and let him share his pain with me. I’ve spent some days FaceTiming with friends and family, and other days choosing not to engage.

But the thing that has helped me the most is what my father did for me and also what Wendell did for me. They couldn’t take away my pain, but they sat with me in my loss in a way that said: I see you, I hear you, I’m with you. This is exactly what we need in grief, and what we can do for one another—now more than ever.

Related Podcast

Listen to Lori Gottlieb share her advice on dealing with grief and answer listener questions on Social Distance , The Atlantic ’s new podcast about living through a pandemic:

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

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The day I got lost

A spiritual look at issues of interest to young people

Jan. 25, 2000, 12:01 p.m. ET

One summer, my family moved to a new city. I was very shy, and my mom knew I might need a little extra help getting used to our new home. She decided it would be good for me to take a summer art class at the school I'd be attending in the fall.

That meant taking a city bus across town to the school. Before my first day of class, my mom rode with me on the bus and showed me how I'd have to ring the bus bell before my stop, so the driver would know to stop. It looked easy enough, and though it was a little scary to do this on my own in a new city, I was sure I could.

The first day of class, I caught the bus just fine. I watched carefully as it got closer to the high school. But I waited a little too long and rang the bell just after the bus passed the stop I needed.

I guess the bus driver thought I rang the bell for the next stop after mine, because he kept on driving. And I was too shy to say anything. It just seemed too hard to do.

So I kept on riding in the bus as it went past the school, across a highway overpass, and into another neighborhood. I was far beyond the school - it was much too far to walk.

I didn't know what else to do, so I got off the bus when it finally stopped. There I stood, in the middle of a neighborhood where all the houses looked alike. For as far as I could see, identical houses lined the streets. I can't really just walk up to one of those strange houses and ask for help, I thought.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I asked God for help. I'd always known that God loved and cared for us, no matter what situation we were in or what mistake we'd made. So I felt sure that God could help me now.

Of course, when you ask someone to help you, you have to listen for the answer. So I stood very quietly and listened. The first thing I remembered was that my dad had some friends who lived in this very neighborhood. We'd been to their house once before, but I didn't remember where it was.

So I listened some more.

This time, I remembered a song I'd sung in Sunday School. The woman who started this newspaper, Mary Baker Eddy, wrote the words in a poem. The poem talks about how God is like a shepherd who guides and cares for us. Part of it says:

I will listen for Thy voice,

Lest my footsteps stray;

I will follow and rejoice

All the rugged way.

I felt very relieved to know that I could trust God to tell me which way I should go. So I started walking, and sang the song to myself while I walked. Every time I came to a corner, I would stand very still and listen for God's direction. I didn't hear an actual voice telling me which way to go. But I would just suddenly feel which way was the right way to turn, and then I would walk that way.

Pretty soon I found myself standing in front of one house. I listened some more, and felt sure this was my dad's friends' house. So I went up and rang the doorbell. And it was the right house! The woman who lived there was very surprised to see me. She let me inside and had me call my mom, who came from work and drove me to the school.

There are two things I remember from that day: the first is how much trouble I got in for not talking to the bus driver when I should have! Everybody seemed kind of mad at me, and I knew I wasn't going to make that mistake again. But even while everyone was lecturing me, I still felt a great peace - because what I'd learned that day seemed so much more important than even trying not to be shy. I'd learned that I could turn to God any- time, in any circumstance, and that He would guide me each step of the way.

I did make some good friends that summer. And they even helped me get over my shyness.

And thine ears shall hear

a word behind thee, saying,

This is the way, walk ye in it,

when ye turn to the right hand,

and when ye turn to the left.

Isaiah 30:21

(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society

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When I Lost My Temper, Essay Example

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When I lost my temper, I did that over what I believed in. I do not easily lose my temper, but it’s worth it when you are fighting for something. Right? Nevertheless, I tend to act more rationally than I did on that day. The following are the events that led to this narration. I was casually walking with my best friend in the park. Other people were indulging in different activities. People were walking their dogs, mothers playing with their children, boys playing football, and others lazily lying around. We were also enjoying the fresh air and strolling around the park. We went across a group of boys our age, and that’s where everything started.

They started whistling at us; you know boys being boys, right? Out of nowhere, a guy passes us by and suddenly starts making chatter noises. We ignore him and take the high road. I mean, we are better than that.  Suddenly, he stops directly calls my friend a monkey. At that moment, I lost my temper. I punched him in the face. Coincidentally, there was a patrol car passing by, and the police officer came to inquire whether everything was alright. When I turned around, my friend was nowhere to be seen. Where did she go?

Who, in this time and day, still looks at people in terms of their race? People should be judged based on their personalities rather than their race, gender, or sexual orientation (Light et al., 2011). We have friends, families, and colleagues from all races, and we work perfectly with them. Racial discrimination should never be allowed to stem in our society. Anyway, I know you are wondering what happened to me, with the racist guy and the officer. I had been seen physically assaulting a person, which is a crime. Despite my efforts to explain it, I still had to face the consequences. I was taken in and had to spend the night at the police station. My parents post my bail the next morning.

I was fighting for something that I believe in. America is a free country, and everybody should exist peacefully without worrying about being discriminated against for who they are. However, I should have stood up for my friend in another way. I should have been more strategic in the way I passed my message. When I lost my temper, I took attention away from the actual issue. All focus was on my action of punching a person. In this instance, it did not help at all.

I am sure you are wondering where my friend went? What kind of friend abandons her friend when she is defending her? Well, she came to me the next morning and explained herself. You see, she was working here on a visa, which was about to expire. A case of being arrested would increase her chances of being denied a visa. Unlike me, my friend does not have the luxury of confronting any situation as I do because the consequences are dire for her. Welch (2007) describes racial profiling in the United States, whereby people from minority communities are more likely to be arrested for crimes, even when they did not commit them. There you have it. That is the story of the day I lost my temper. I have learned my lessons. I hope you have picked yours from my experience.

Light, R., Roscigno, V. J., & Kalev, A. (2011). Racial discrimination, interpretation, and legitimation at work.  The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science ,  634 (1), 39-59.

Welch, K. (2007). Black criminal stereotypes and racial profiling.  Journal of contemporary criminal justice ,  23 (3), 276-288.

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When I Lost Myself Essays Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Psychology , Education , Communication , Development , Middle East , Life , United States , English

Published: 02/20/2020

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I have always been the perfect student back in my country, Kuwait. Since, I was a kid I dreamt of going to the United States of America to study there, and complete my bachelor’s degree. Right now I have been awarded a government scholarship to go and study in the United States of America. This has had a great impact in my life because since then, I have been excited and I know this is an answered prayer. Regardless of the excitement, my life has taken a different twist because in a way, I felt like I had lost a part of me, the part that belonged to Kuwait, to my family and also to my friends. In a nutshell, I feel that my personality has greatly changed. When I got here, I just realized that my spoken and written English was not as good. This is so because it is not my first language. I found myself among people who used English as their first language and who were very good at it. I believed I was good in it because of how competent I was back at home until I got to the USA. It dawned on me that I was getting almost everything wrong. This led me to ask myself a lot of questions whether it was only me who had a problem with my English or there are other people that we share the same experience with. I found comfort in the words of one writer, Don Larson “Language is more than a tool for understanding and being understood. It helps us maintain health and well-being. Without it we imprison our minds and lose control of our emotions. Slowly, but surely, we die a social death”. According to him, without language our social life dies. And many people believe that without language, they cannot communicate and this is not true. But now I understand that language is a communication system. It is true that we use language to communicate with others. However, language is much more than a communication system. People can use other means to communicate and a good example is the use of signs and the body as well. Music also is a tool of communication and it goes beyond the use of words and language. It can make a person understand another. All in all, since my arrival in the United Sates, so much has changed about me. The change has gone beyond my personality up to the things I do and how I do them. A good example is how I address different people to the way I eat. A new place and a new country can change a person completely. There are things about me that have changed positively. I cannot say that the change is good or bad but the bottom line is that, I am no longer the same. Even amid all these challenges, I try so much not to use difficult words that might confuse me when am talking the Native Americans. Sometimes when I say them, I do so incorrectly and this makes me feel embarrassed. But the one thing I have come to learn and appreciate is the fact that language is a powerful tool and it goes beyond spellings and pronunciations In conclusion, learning English language did change how I see things and think but it has not really changed who I am. It has made me a better person because I have learnt to appreciate other people and I am proud to say that other people have also learnt to appreciate me and my flaws. Language is a powerful tool that speaks to the heart even in signs and other forms of communication (Sandoval 23). Therefore, no one should be afraid of saying the wrong things, with experience and time, this changes as they perfect their skills. It is true that learning a new language can be hard, but language can help you change the way you think and makes you see life from a different perspective. Language is a great tool to communicate and English has become part of the tools that I use to communicate.

Works Cited

Larson, Don. Guidelines for barefoot Language Learning: An Approach Through Involvement and Independence. Bloomington: Indiana University. 1984 Sandoval, Emanuel. The Importance of Learning a Foreign Language in a Changing Society. Bloomington: iUniverse. 2005

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The Child Got Lost at the Crowd - Essay Example

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