Loss and the Limits of One’s Art

By Grace Bauer

Grief. It’s a destination we try to avoid but all arrive at eventually. It’s as common as the dirt we all end up in. Or as. Impossible to live with. Or without. Loss a fact of life. There are as many ways to lose our dearly beloveds as there are to love them.

There’s the slow, often painful, decline of someone’s aging body—life refusing to let them go even when they say they’re ready to leave. Or the loss of memory, a slippage so disturbing because it can look, to those who witness it, like a going going gone of what we think of as a loved one’s essential self; their minds diminishing while their bodies refuse to give up what we sometimes call the ghost.

Both are dramas we are forced to witness from the sidelines, even as we act out our bit parts. Our ministrations both loving and inept. We may bathe someone who can no longer bathe themselves, comb their thinning hair, search for their false teeth in the sheets; we may remind someone of what day it is, though what day it is hardly matters. We may serve soup, empty bedpans, rub swollen feet; we may listen to a story we have heard a hundred times, anticipating the day when there will be no one left to slurp that soup or tell that particular story. And we know we will miss it, even though we have it memorized.

Or we may be forced to face the sudden loss of someone who chooses to depart on their own unimaginable terms, leaving us behind to wail why or torment ourselves with what if?

By the we I employ above, I mean, of course, myself. You will have your own version of such stories. All of them difficult to put into words—though, if we are writers, a bony-fingered muse points to a blank screen or a flimsy sheet of paper and demands that we try. We struggle to render our inarticulate moans into syllables, lines, perhaps stanzas or paragraphs, though none of these feel large enough to hold the ache that has come to inhabit us. This space we inhabit. It’s a space we know everyone must—sooner or later, one way or another—inhabit as well, yet it’s the loneliest place we have ever been. Will ever be. And sometimes we wonder if we have the right to tell the story of our grief when it’s another person who is losing their very life, and often suffering in the process. And if we have the right to tell the story, do we have the skill? Can we use our words to fill the void or, at least, describe it so that when others enter, they might feel they have—if not solace, at least company, or a rudimentary map to help them navigate through.  

Elizabeth Bishop, in her well-known villanelle, advises us to master what she calls “the art of losing,” suggesting practice will help us perfect this dubious “art.” She starts with stuff—and who among us has not lost a bunch of stuff over the years. Things we thought we loved. But things are relatively easy. Though we may miss objects that held meaning or value for us, the world is full of other objects that can take their place. How often have we heard people who’ve lost their homes, whole neighborhoods, to natural disasters, say “at least we’re alive and have each other.” Having never gone through such an experience myself, I don’t want to minimize that kind of devastation or pretend I understand it, and I know there are many people in the world who are so poor, they have never had much, in terms of stuff, to lose. That is its own kind of ongoing trauma, a level of deprivation I can hardly imagine. But for those of us privileged enough to have enough on the basic material level, the loss of things is a loss we can withstand. The people we love are another story, as Bishop is forced to admit in her poem. Their loss lasts a lifetime, becomes part of us. Changes who we are.

No matter how many times, and ways, we go through these losses, how many dress rehearsals we attend, how many lines we repeat, none of us ever masters this kind of grief. Losing those we love is a disaster most of us survive, though not unscathed. Grief may be the one heirloom every one of us can count on inheriting. Elegy one of the songs we share to help one another live. All we can do is (Write it!) as badly as we must, as best we can.
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Grace Bauer has published six books of poetry—most recently, Unholy Heart: New & Selected Poems (Backwaters Press/University of Nebraska Press). She also co-edited the anthologies Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse and Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical & Creative Responses to Everette Maddox. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in several anthologies, as well as Ascent, Brilliant Corners, Palo Alto Review, Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, and previously on The Brevity Blog.