To be alive is to be aware, even if only dimly, of the striking paradox of the human situation. All of them place us at risk: in making them we expose ourselves to the possibility of losing them and having to deal with retrieving our investment. Some bondings are attempts to fill up our blank spaces and emptiness. In others, we find echoes of earlier experiences which still resonate with meaning for us. ![]() They are the occasions we use to extend, amplify and perfect ourselves. We make attachments throughout the entire course of our lives. Although it would seem that persons are well defined units, quite separate and distinct from the world and all it contains, the boundaries of the self are actually quite fluid. Loss is inevitable sooner or later we must all endure it. ![]() Over and over again, the mind turns to the repetitious tasks of grieving, working laboriously at the painful business of assessing the reality and extent of the catastrophe, of leave-taking and finally, of repair of the self. Which of us on hearing it, does not recall a once present, now vanished person or thing – or even a beloved place from which we are exiled? The images leap into the consciousness unbidden, oddly unaltered by time, as vivid and fresh and they were when our relationships with them were most current. In its aftermath, the very word can produce a feeling of anguish that is almost physically painful. There is probably no more profound suffering in the spectrum of human experience than that occasioned by loss.
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