Earlier today I posted the following three notes on twitter regarding my experience this afternoon at the theater:
“Saw Joan Didion’s play, “The Year Of Magical Thinking” this afternoon. It was a very interesting show that demonstrated a wealth of love.”
“Love and loss are so intrinsically linked as to be inseparable–one defines the other. Didion’s play looks at the result of that relationship.”
“I am bothered by the play’s conceit that the audience can not know what it means to grieve, or the nature of loss. It’s a bit presumptuous.”
My twitter account populates every social networking site on the planet, and thus one of my friends on Facebook responded with the following:
I’m not sure I agree with that, I’ve felt love and loss without the other being involved.”
I thought my response was worth sharing in this forum as it captures my feeling on the matter of love and loss. I think it also effectively addresses my friend’s sentiment without treating him with any disrespect. I honestly believe in the connection between these two experiences, and I hope the following demonstrates my perspective on the matter.
There are so many responses I could offer to that sentiment, but I’ll try to limit myself to only four.
- Rational Response: To truly love a thing, no matter how small, you can rest assured that at some time in your life you will lose that thing. The list of possibilities is endless but I’ll use alliteration to express it most poetically: departure, disappearance, death.
- Emotional Response: Love is a subjective thing that each of us defines every morning as the sun crests the horizon, but in the simplest of terms love can be reduced to the emotional response one experiences in the absence of a thing.To feel the loss of a person, pet, or favorite comic book is to understand the true meaning of love. Without that emotion, that connection, the loss would not be felt–it would lack meaning. Love might be a swooning rhapsody playing to a couple kissing on the deck of a sinking ship… but it is also the emotional response to the presence or absence of a thing.
- Pissy Response: I’m an artist and I demand to be granted a certain amount of poetic license! But seriously, I’m not talking about losing your keys. In truth I’m talking about death. But to be fair to your sentiment, the loss of something even as simple as one’s keys or wallet may evoke frustration, fear, or even hysteria—but the fact remains that when you go select a new wallet from the store you will be reminded of the one you lost. Your memory of that loss lends itself to my point, even a simple thing has meaning when it’s gone. The same can be true of a set of keys. Love does not have to be confined by traditional norms; love is more than a feeling.And to close my pissy rant: when you “lose” something you truly care nothing about, it’s not really lost to you.
- Cryptic Dramatic Response: One day… you WILL understand.
If you don’t feel the loss of something, then I truly believe it’s not lost to you. I know that by restating this I’m being repetitious, but hopefully I’m also driving home my point: The connection between love and loss relies on the notion that the person who experiences either emotion must actually mean it. If you really care about losing something, then the connection is clear. If you really love something, you will eventually lose it and, again, the connection is clear. The interdependency of these two experiences are so intertwined they become difficult to distinguish.
I should also point out that sweeping generalizations gets me no-where fast with literal and logical thinkers, especially when it comes to highly emotional topics. Of course there are going to be contradictory experiences to this line of thinking… but that doesn’t make it any less true.
The human experience is vast and varied. We may all walk the same well trodden path in life, but no two people will experience that journey in exactly the same way. Some experiences are universal… I believe that the above is true for most people.