“Change is Loss”
My semester of classes is ending this week. It has been an incredible few months of learning. So much so that I feel like future semesters will have a hard time living up to this one. We’ve reached the adjourning stage of our time together and I’m keenly feeling what Evan Pierce, VP of People and Culture at the Boston Celtics, said in one of our classes, “Change is loss.” When we’re dealing with change, we need to also tend to the feelings of loss.
In my last blog, I talked about my overuse of paradoxes and how I’m drawn to trying to find “and/both” answers to most situations (Here’s a link to the post). One of the places I do this is during change – especially if change means the end of a group’s time together. I want to keep the door open. I don’t want to “lose” the relationships I’ve created there. This comes out in sometimes comical ways such as the fact that there are many TV series where I have refused to watch the final episode. I’ve convinced myself that if I didn’t see the ending, maybe it didn’t actually end. It drives my husband crazy. However, in trying to avoid the loss, I’m robbing myself of a sense of closure. I didn’t realize how much peace closure can grant until my therapist encouraged me to find a way to close out many of my unmet expectations at the end of the year last year.
Last year was incredibly difficult for me. My mom’s 14-month journey with brain cancer ended and we buried her the day before Mother’s Day. Today is actually the 1-month anniversary of her passing. On top of that, about a month and a half later, I closed my business of 7 years that I had built from the ground up. With so much radical change came a great deal of loss, grief, and burnout. In many ways I had lost my sense of identity, and the burnout left me feeling depleted and alone. I was worried that closing out or adjourning my experiences would mean that I had nothing left, so I tried to leave doors open and hold out hope for dreams that weren’t actually possible. The disappointment that comes when dreams aren’t being realized was especially bad for my mental health and my therapist had me practice radical acceptance in an attempt to get me to live in the present. Eventually, we both realized that I needed to find closure on the things that I had hoped were going to happen but weren’t actually going to happen.
So, I did an exercise. I wrote out the things that I wanted to keep with me from the year and the things that I needed to let go on little pieces of paper. Then, with my family, I went out to a bluff in southern Utah at sunset on the last day of the year. As the sun went down, we said out loud the things we were letting go and dropped a pebble off the cliff’s edge. As for the things we wanted to keep, we put the papers into our suitcases to carry them home with us. It became a little ritual to make the act of closure feel more real to me and it brought a surprising amount of peace.
In my Groups and Cultures class, we talked about Tuckman’s 5 stages of a group and we spent our last couple of classes together in the adjourning stage. Closing out a semester that has brought me hope again is stirring up some strong emotions in me. It doesn’t help to have this all coincide with the date of my mom’s passing. And yet, because the ending of our class wasn’t a surprise and we were purposeful in how we wrapped things up, I’m also feeling a sense of peace. I’m realizing that I can apply this to the grief journey we had with my mom as well.
When we were working through the stages of grief with my mom’s cancer, we found acceptance when we were purposeful about the adjourning of my mom’s experience here on earth. Those experiences are some of our most meaningful memories. I’ve written about my mom’s “free haircuts” experience, for instance, and that was just the beginning. (You can check out that story here).
Whether it was dancing around the kitchen, watching home videos, or performing for Mom, adjourning is when we began the process of healing. It all came together at her funeral. My dad gave my sisters and me the assignment to find a value that my mom embodied and then use stories from her life to teach others about that value during our speeches at her funeral. He taught us that any life can be used as an object lesson to others. The lessons we found and spoke about were inspiring, uplifting and motivating for all that attended. I don’t know that I’ve been to a funeral where there was so much laughter and genuine joy before.
But we didn’t stop there.
My mom had 5 daughters and no sons. She was an advocate for female strength, so when it came to pallbearers, we, as her daughters, decided we would be her pallbearers. The honor of carrying my mom’s body to its final resting place was incredibly impactful. As we walked in time, while humming “Amazing Grace,” we felt strong and knew we were doing her proud. We could practically hear her cheering us on. The comments about how cool it was felt pretty good too. And then, before we left the graveside, we passed around pens to sign her coffin. You see, my mom always considered dying a “graduation from this life” so we thought, let’s make this a graduation party. Writing out our messages to her like we would on a yearbook was cathartic and created a connection and cohesion between all who were there. This was the power of a well-adjourned experience.
So here I am, sitting at another crossroads of change. A much smaller change, but one that is triggering scary feelings within me, nonetheless. Instead of trying to spin my wheels to find a way to keep as many doors open as I can during this change, I’m looking for ways to adjourn my experiences with grace. I need the peace and I need the closure. This blog is one of those ways. I’ll also journal offline to continue my reflection. If you’re at an adjourning phase with something as well, below are some prompts that I use to help myself reflect, express gratitude, and let go so I can create a sense of closure for myself. I recommend writing out your own answers and then find a way to do something that can make the act of closure feel real to you.
Erika’s Adjourning Reflection Questions:
What are a few meaningful things that I want to remember from this experience?
How have my feelings changed from the start of this experience to now?
Are there any lessons or skills that I want to take with me moving forward?
What was a lowlight from this experience?
What do I need to let go from this experience? How does that make me feel?
Are there any changes I want to make moving forward?
Can I summarize this experience in a couple of short sentences?
What is one word I can use to describe my experience?
“The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Thanks for reading with me today. I hope you find some peace in reflection, intention, and letting go today.