Loss Involves Change - The Transformative Power of Loss and Change

There are many experiences in life, which remind us that change is an inevitable part of living. We then have to choose to either to resist this process or look for new ways of finding meaning in our lives. Losing a loved one to homicide, for example, is one of those changes that throw our lives into chaos and disarray. We are forced to see our world very differently, knowing that things will never be the same again. Our loss involves substantial change in every aspect of our lives.

There are many experiences of change which also involve loss, although they are not as extreme and tragic as losing a loved one to murder. However, these changes also involve loss as they challenge our very sense of stability and safety in the world. I would like to share a personal story of personal change, which challenged my way of looking at the world. It reminded me that all change involves loss and all loss involves change. It forced me to look at what writers and philosophers called Existential Angst - the anxiety associated with the reality of our own death and finitude.

I was offered the opportunity to join my partner and live in Australia. I am from the UK and although I had worked abroad extensively (although not lived abroad), I thought this process was going to be easy. Alas, the practicalities were relatively easy - the emotional and existential anxieties were the ones that took my energies.

I could not have estimated the enormity of excitement, change, endings, anxiety and changing sense of self I would and continue to experience. This coloured my sense of self and identity. I experienced change on all fronts - country, Home, work, study, community, finances, access to friends, familiarity with what is known and most important a changing sense of identity, belonging and safety. Despite the excitement and opportunity to live abroad, it caused me to question 'who am I?' and highlighted the changing nature of me and the finiteness of everything. This may sound dramatic but I was not a young girl exploring the world but a woman in her 40s who was making a major life change.

How easy it would have been for me to dismiss this process and be caught up in the practicalities brought about by this change? Shortly before leaving the UK, I wrote down a particular experience I had had following terminating my work of nine years. This change, whilst in practical terms, was highly manageable, tapped into a whole range of emotions related to grief and loss. writing down this experience immediately after it happened gave me the opportunity to consider moving country as a potent existential experience. The following is the experience - exactly as I wrote it at the time.

" How can I explain what it is like preparing to go and live in another country? Once the decision is made, one is often preoccupied with the practicalities of the move. However, the reality of beginnings and endings is brought sharply into focus and if one takes time to reflect on the process, you can learn something very fundamental about the process of living.

The multitude of beginnings and endings I have been faced with over the past two months leads me to ask the question 'Is this what it is like when you are preparing to die?' That may sound dramatic but the last time I experienced such intensity of emotion on a daily, sometimes-hourly basis was when my mother died of cancer. The enormity of beginnings and endings, attachment and loss, sadness and joy, fear and celebration is experienced at one and the same time. In moving to another country, there is a feeling that something very radical is happening and you are forced to reflect on every encounter meaningfully, wanting to evaluate it and tie all lose ends - practical and emotional. There is also a sense that you will never pass this way again. Perhaps an example of how this is happening to me will help.

This evening I finished working with my company and felt very churned up - not with the actual work but the realisation of the end of an era of all the things that have happened over the nine years since I had been there. I felt quite alone in the process when I got on the train but unexpectedly bumped into a colleague and friend with whom I worked with on the first day with this company - funny that I should also see him on the last one as we