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When my young father died, my twenty-one-year-old mother had nowhere to go, no professional
education to fall back on, no place in the circle of men who did the hiring, opened the business,
controlled the credit in town. Institutions did not invest in women. Thirty years later when her second
husband, my stepfather, died as well, little had really changed. She still had few options. She was still a
woman in a society of male organizations. She still had only what his job enabled him to leave her to live
on. For women, losing the men in their lives is still to be left on the brink of destitution.

Loss, any kind of loss—rejection, abandonment, divorce, death—is a shocking, numbing, gray thing that
at the outset, at least, freezes the heart and slows the mind. Loss changes life at the root. Irrevocably.
What was once the center of life—the person, the position, the plan, the lifestyle—is no more. What
shaped our identities, what fashioned our days and filled our sleep, what gave us meaning and
direction, comfort and support, has disappeared like sunset on a cloudless night.

And yet loss, once reckoned, once absorbed, is a precious gift. No, I cannot be what I was before but I
can be—I must be—something new. There is more of God in me, I discover in emptiness, than I have ever
known in what I once took to be fullness.

There are spiritual lessons to be learned from loss that can be barely divined by any other means and
often despite ourselves. We learn, just when we think we have nothing, just when it feels that we have
not one good thing left in the world, that what we do still have is ourselves. We have, deep down inside
us what no one can take away, what can never be lost either to time or to chance: We have the self
that brought us to this point—and more. We have gifts of God in abundance, never noticed, never
touched, perhaps, but a breath in us nevertheless and waiting to be tapped. And more, whatever we
have developed over the years in the center of ourselves—the grit; the hope; the calm; the bottomless,
pulsating, irrepressible trust in the providence of God despite the turns of fortune—is here now to be
mined like gold, scratched out and melted down, shaped and shined into a whole new life. We have
within us the raw material of life. And we have it for the taking.

The truth of loss is a freeing one: It is the grave of something we loved—this person, this path, this
place—that calls forth the resurrection of the self. Then the past has done its doing. Then the Word of
God becomes new life to us. Then life becomes a series of possibilities which, when taken seriously,
make us whole. Then, we take another road, not because we know what will happen at the end of it
but because we cannot be whole without walking it.

--from The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every Woman’s Life by Joan Chittister, art by John August
Swanson (Eerdmans)