Reflections on Loss

Weekly wisdom to bring you home in 3 minutes.

A SHORT STORY

As the year comes to a close, I find myself still reckoning with loss.

For myself, it’s my father. For some of you, it could be the loss of a relationship, a job, a place.

I read something the other day that grief is actually a form of enlightenment. In the Zen tradition, this is called Kensho, which translates to “seeing one’s true nature”. This is what grief brings us: an awakening to a deeper reality beyond the illusion of a separate self.

On the morning of February 24th, I remember after my Dad took his final breath, I called Anastasiia and tried to reach her. When I couldn’t connect with her by phone, I texted four simple words:

“He’s gone, my heart.”

I remember how my heart broke in that moment, plunged into the sheer physical absence of the person I just lost.

What I’m reflecting on now is how that loss breaks apart all of our defenses, which has me wondering what is possible in that new space. Maybe grief is not only the closing of a chapter but the opening of a doorway. Maybe in the experience of loss, something truer can finally step forward.

What might be waiting for you in the new year?

A POEM

“It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off” by Hanif Abdurraqib

that one time in the ’98 NBA finals & in praise of one man’s hand on the waist of another’s & in praise of the ways we guide our ships to the shore of some brief & gilded mercy I touch my fingers to the hips of this vast & immovable grief & push once more & who is to say really how much weight was behind Jordan’s palm on that night in Utah & on that same night one year earlier the paramedics pulled my drowning mother from the sheets where she slept & they said it must have felt like a whole hand was pushing down on her lungs & I spent the whole summer holding my breath in bed until the small black spots danced on the ceiling & I am sorry that there is no way to describe this that is not about agony or that is not about someone being torn from the perch of their comfort & on the same night a year before my mother died Jordan wept on the floor of the United Center locker room after winning another title because it was father’s day & his father went to sleep on the side of a road in ’93 & woke up a ghost & there is no moment worth falling to our knees & galloping towards like the one that sings our dead into the architecture & so yes for a moment in 1998 Michael Jordan made what space he could on the path between him & his father’s small & breathing grace

& so yes,

there is an ocean between us the length of my arm & I have built nothing for you that can survive it

& from here I am close enough to be seen but not close enough to be cherished

& from here, I can see every possible ending before we even touch.

Grateful,

Michael