Balancing Both Loss and Gratitude: When Having Courage Means Surrendering

As I was packing to leave for my trip down to Smith Rock, my first trip there since my accident, a dear friend mine dropped by unexpectedly.

She told me that she had been thinking about me, about this trip, and all that would be going on inside my head and heart.

"So I wanted to give you this...," she said as she placed a small piece of metal into the palm of my hand and closed my fingers around it.

I opened my hand and studied this smooth, rock-like nugget in my hand.

Etched into the nugget was the word "Loss"

She explained that she knew I had spent so much of this last year mustering courage, being strong, fighting the odds. And yet, she wanted to remind me that it was important for me to just accept the pain of the loss I've had- that it is okay to just feel that loss and accept it, surrender to it.

What an incredible gift this was.

Though I have so much to be grateful for- grateful that my head, back, neck and life were spared, grateful that I came out of that accident as well as I did (all things considered), grateful for superb medical care and rehab, I really haven't given myself that much time to just feel the loss, to let the feelings surface and flood my body. I've only begun to let myself grieve.

And in order to fully release this experience, in order to really make peace with this place, I do, in fact, need to just accept the loss that I have experienced. I can't fight it. I can't push it away with courage and strength and determination. All of those qualities are wonderful but there is a certain point when you just have to let yourself experience the pain in your heart.

You have to breathe it in.

Loss.

It is a scary thing to totally embrace it. I don't really want to feel the helplessness or victimization feelings that come with that. Admitting to and feeling all of the loss I've had in the last year or so (physical, emotional) leaves me feeling vulnerable; it reminds me how fragile life truly is and how little control we have over so much of it.

But there is no escaping it. I can't- and shouldn't- try and mask that helpless, vulnerable feeling by powering through it.

Perhaps, I decided, it is more brave to admit vulnerability and loss than to rail against it with determination.

So as I was sitting at the base of Carabid, the climb I fell on, for the very first time since the accident, one of the things I did to make peace was to write the words, "Gratitude" and "Loss" on opposite sides of a piece of paper. Focusing on all I had to be grateful for as well as accepting all I had lost, I crumpled this piece of paper and tucked it into a crack at the base of the climb.

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PS: After having written this post, I learned later that the same morning I was at Smith Rock for the first time since my accident, writing the words Loss and Gratitude on that piece of paper, my mother had seen a rock in a store with the word, "Gratitude" on it and bought if for me with this particular trip back to Smith in mind. It was a word that had just come into my mind that morning as I'd been thinking about how to balance the feelings of loss. This "coincidence" definitely made me pause in awe about the kind of wavelength she and I share.