What Loss Asked of Me - A Personal Story of Letting Go

From the start of my life on this earth, I moved through the world with abandon - running, skipping, playing hard in competitive sports, my body a willing and able partner in all of it.

As the years passed, I slowed, but traded speed for something deeper: long solo hikes into the natural world, ten, twelve, fifteen miles at my own pace, in my own silence. These were not just walks. They were my reset, a way of returning to quiet and listening more deeply.  I felt invincible in that body, free to do almost anything I wanted. It never occurred to me that one day it could be otherwise.

Then, with age, the body begins its negotiations.

Aching joints. Inflammation. Stiffness. Moving no longer was pure joy. My last hike at 70 was in Canada, knee braced and determined, wringing every mile out of what I had left.

The knee needed replacing, and I believed, needed to believe, that surgery would restore me. That medicine would hand my freedom back.

It did not.

The surgery that was supposed to return me to myself took something instead.

What was meant to be a restoration became a rupture.

The promise of medicine failed, and I came out the other side not better than before but diminished in ways I was not prepared for. The life I had known in my body — that invincible, trail-eating, silence-seeking body -  was gone.

In the aftermath, I withdrew. I did not want to hear about other people’s plans, their hikes, their adventures, their peppy enthusiasm for the life I used to live. I narrowed my circle to those who wouldn’t inadvertently wound me with their aliveness. Depression moved in. Anger too. And underneath both, something quieter and more shameful: self-pity.

While I was at home healing, a friend serendipitously left a small gift at my front door: an oracle deck: The Wisdom of Hafiz. How did she know this Persian poet had been a companion of mine for some thirty years? That his words had brought me contemplation and solace across decades of my life? I don’t know. But there it was.

One day, somewhere in the slow crawl of recovery, I made a decision to use the deck for self-inquiry.   For thirty days, every morning before anything else I would go outside to a sunny spot with my tea, hold the deck in my hands, and draw one card. I would sit with the card, read it, sit some more. Write if something rose up. An hour, each morning. Day after day.

Sometime around the twenty-third day, I drew a card. It read:

“…At any given moment, everything is working out for you.

It’s not happening to you, but for you.”

My first reaction was visceral: Bullshit. How could anyone claim that loss and suffering happen for you? I wasn’t ready to hear it. I wasn’t ready to let go of my anger or my regret. I dismissed the card, though I couldn’t quite dismiss its message.  Its words settled quietly in the back of my mind.

It was not just this one card that profoundly affected my healing. I want to be honest about that.

It was the thirty days themselves - the ritual, and what slowly unfolded for months, years afterward.

Rising each morning.

Making tea.

Returning to the same place in the sun.

Holding the deck.

Becoming still.

Asking the same quiet question: What do I need to know? What do I need to learn?

Then waiting.

Listening, not for an immediate answer, but for something quieter. A whisper. A shift in perspective I might easily have missed had I not been paying attention.

Card after card. Verse after verse. Many seemed to speak directly to some neglected corner of my inner life.

My journal from those days tells the truth of where I was:

“So, I need to trust this disintegrating body? The ever-present aches and pains of aging…of dying. Tick tock. Tick tock. Life is a trajectory: aging, illness, death. All will come. Struggling with aloneness. Lack of play in my life. I don’t know what to do about any of it. Engage trust. That needs a prayer of sorts.”

And somewhere within that not-knowing, something quietly began to shift.

People sometimes say, “You have to accept things.” It has always felt patronizing to me, as if acceptance were simply a decision you make. That is not how it works. I know, because it took me two years.

But I did arrive there. Slowly. On my own terms, in my own time.

Looking back now, I can see what this experience did for me.  It stripped away my illusion of invincibility. It brought me face to face with the lived reality of adapting to loss of function. It taught me, in my bones rather than merely in my mind, that aging is, in many ways, a gradual letting go.

It also deepened my empathy for every older adult I worked with during my decades as a geriatric care manager. I thought I understood their experience. Now I understand it in a way I couldn’t before.

To me, this is one of the cornerstones of growing old.   Not loss itself, but what it asks of us.

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