Josh Goldberg on Grief & Loss

And the truth about all of our lives is that nothing in them is permanent — whether that’s the work we have, the relationship we have, whatever it may be. Everything at some point will come to an end. Even if you have, like my grandparents, a lifelong love and marriage, at some point somebody’s not going to be there anymore. And our capacity to navigate through the fact that life is impermanent is what grief is all about.

Now, when we think about grief, we tend to focus solely on the loss of a person. And of course, that is a major trigger of grief and requires us to be able to grieve effectively. But the truth is that grief is a part of a lot of different processes.

We grieve when we end up getting divorced. And if I had only known that that’s what I was experiencing when I was getting divorced, I would have been much better off. But we grieve the life that is no longer available to us.

We grieve when our beloved son goes to college. And we’re so proud of them, but we lose the ability to connect in the same way with someone who’s become our best friend.

We grieve when we can’t serve in the military anymore, and we look back at some of the highlights of our life and yearn to do what we used to do.

We grieve when we retire from the police force and we’re sort of AWOL and no one’s checking up on us anymore.

And so it is so important, as we think about life and all of the facets of life, that we learn how to grieve.

Recently, I got the chance to spend some time with an Israeli. And this Israeli’s father had been — every member of his family, all 57 members of his family besides him — was killed by the Nazis in Ukraine during World War II as part of the Holocaust. And his father spent the majority of his life trying to figure out why he survived — why on that day he wasn’t killed and everyone else was.

And his father concluded, after many years, that his responsibility was to continue and to never forget. Continue and never forget.

And this is the idea — the paradox of posttraumatic growth — right? The idea that we have to remember those we’ve lost, especially under terms like that and circumstances like that, and we have to continue to move forward.

And it is why, for us, when we think about the notion of grief and loss in our life — the impermanence that is life — the single best visual reflection of this idea is the Kintsugi art, which comes from Japan.

And Kintsugi is based, in a lot of respects, on the Hemingway quote: “The world breaks everyone, and some of us are stronger in the broken parts.” Kintsugi — they take a bowl that is broken, and they put it back together, and they use gold in the cracked parts. And the idea is that that piece is now more valuable, and it is more beautiful, because it broke.

That is the story of all of our lives. But the question is: how do we navigate the brokenness? How do we navigate the experiences that throw us and put us to our knees and cause us to struggle?

And learning how to grieve well — which is an essential part of learning how to struggle well — is a really important part of that. And talking about it, and disclosing about it, and being willing to acknowledge the uncertainty and ambiguity and the hardship that is a part of those processes is an essential part of what it means to live a life that is worth living.