Counting Loss Counts
Why Loss Assessment is Crucial for Happiness
It happens in experiences of extreme danger, like close calls or accidents. Time slows and people do the required actions with baffling calm. The emergency unfolds in slow motion, followed by shaking and weakness. The slow-motion experience occurs because the brain works more quickly, and the external circumstances appear to move more slowly. Physiologically, vision and hearing become tunneled, pain is blocked, senses focus, breathing increases, blood vessels dilate, blood flow increases, and there’s a sudden burst of energy. After the adrenaline rush people feel shaky because of plunging blood sugar and a drop in blood pressure or heart rate that engaged the flight-or-fight response. Only after the shock wears off do we appreciate what we were able to do and begin to assess the loss.
Like the calm–or numbing–we feel in a close call, the shock when bad news suddenly strikes takes weeks or months to sink in. We tell our disrupters, “I can’t handle you! Just go away!” or we get engulfed in our feelings–especially anxiety–and can’t see our way out of the pit. It’s common to enter a survival state with mental resources dispatched to cope instead of feel. Medical decisions need to be made; acute pain must be endured; funeral arrangements require attention. Reality refuses to settle in. We naturally condemn, refuse, or reject the crisis because it shocks our system. Ms. Zhdanova, a Ukrainian in Chernihiv, describes this when the bombs stopped in a WSJ article: “Your first reaction is shock. You are stunned. Your mind rejects it. You see it with your eyes, like a camera, like you are not a human being. Then after five or ten minutes, you realize how terrifying it is and start trembling, shaking, crying.” Often, we only understand a loss long after it happens.
I illustrate this with a recent experience of the removal of mask mandates in my school. I stand in front of my classes taking in their faces for the first time, their beautiful, smiling faces. A common thing in normal times, I am struck with how special it is to see a face. I feel not only joy and gain but also sadness and loss. The loss of smiles is a loss of human connection and community. A smile is one of the most contagious things in the world. Someone smiles at me, I smile back, and I smile at another person who returns a smile and passes it on to a third. This continues all day long, creating a chain reaction that links strangers and friends throughout the day. What starts as a simple smile grows into an invisible bond buoying the spirit. The profound loss of smiles for close to two years registers. Perhaps some of our rancor in society has arisen from the absence of smiling mouths compared to which smiling eyes are an inadequate substitute. Now as I walk the halls, students see and greet one another, and a neighborly feeling is emerging from the dusty ashes of pandemic loss. I feel happy, and the students do too.
Truth is another casualty of the long pandemic months. The day the mask mandate ends, I ask a student if he completed the required reading for the day, and his response is a smile that reveals he did not. A mask would have–and probably did–disguise that truth. I joke with him that his lips ratted him out. Another student confesses that she frowned and scowled behind the mask when she disagreed with or didn’t like something–or someone. Lips, more than other parts of the face, are carriers of specific emotions. Smiling, quivering, tense, or downturned mouths speak the state of the heart and feelings. As I listen to the class discussion that day, I adjust my notion of how their faces look. One boy with a high voice has a more mature face than I imagine, another has a noble face, and another has a vulnerable look. Each face reveals hidden knowledge that requires me to adjust my preconceived notions. Now that the clues are visible again, I feel sadness over how shallow my understanding of my students is.
Naming and assessing loss of all kinds is crucial for moving ahead in life. Unfortunately, we are best equipped to name loss only after the shock wears off and the urge to move on compels us. Sometimes people argue that assessing loss interferes with a desperately needed positive attitude. Others worry it leads to self-absorption. The problem with not naming loss, however, is that it extends and compounds the negative feelings associated with loss. Depression and anger result from trying to push loss underground. Like a beach ball under water, the feelings are hard to keep submerged. Dealing with loss is much like grieving, the product of which is a willingness to let go and live without what is lost. Shortcuts simply short-circuit the process and delay–even inhibit–future flourishing. So, I want to move on, but thoughtfully, not blindly.
Naming loss orders our lives and offers hope. It’s like cleaning a messy drawer. First, I must see the mess and decide to do something about it. I toss, organize, tuck, and stack items and replace the disarray with order. The items are no longer thrown together in an unused mess, but each item has a renewed purpose. The repurposed mess reveals new uses for the disarray. This injects a glimmer of hope. Maybe my losses will be repurposed, and I will discover something new from the loss. Maybe I will become a deeper and better person from my loss. I cannot explain how this happens, but naming the loss helps me let go of what is lost and attune my heart to new possibilities. It’s like “spring cleaning” not because of the season itself but because of what the season means to me.