As recently as six weeks ago, I considered myself an expert on loss. My mother died suddenly when she was 51 and I was 17.The failure of my marriage to a man I truly loved provided another round in the important, but painful, lessons of loss. And so I thought that I could offer a reliable path to those who are losing their jobs, their homes, or seeing their life savings evaporate as the economy implodes before our eyes.

In recent years, twigs that look like birds caught my fancy and I now love my collection that looks like ancient, exotic birds. I also picked up a gracefully formed branch that I really liked. I don’t know how it happened to be on my back porch, instead of in my storage shed one morning. I left it on the chair instead of putting it inside my apartment, which would have taken all of 45 seconds. When I got home that night it was missing. Someone undoubtedly thought it was trash, and could not have known that I treasured it.

My hiking boots were unrepairable, said the shoe repair guy. I was delighted that LL Bean accepts returns and shipped them back with a note saying how much I loved those boots and how sad I was that they couldn’t be repaired. Logging onto the LL Bean website later, I saw that they re-sole boots for a fee. Unfortunately, due to the way that I sent them back, they are forever lost in an efficient a warehouse operation. It is naive to think that the receiving clerk could have read my note and thought to send them for repair rather than replacement. Challenge of Staffing Retail Businesses talks about how I hate to throw stuff away and buying good shoes and repairing them is my custom. I expect to receive boots that are inferior to the pair that I bought eight years ago, that I hiked in, were perfectly broken in and that I loved.

As I grieve over the boots that I loved and the branch that I loved, I am struck by the emotion that I feel surrounding these losses. Intellectually I know that people are losing their homes, their life savings, limbs and even loved ones. So, if I mourn the utterly inconsequential losses of a pair of comfortable boots and an artful branch, I’m not nearly the loss expert that I prided myself on being six weeks ago. This leads me to understand, yet again, that processing loss takes time. Bob Thompson, the gifted, beloved minister of Lake Street Church, says that the spiritual journey is the never ending discipline of keeping your heart open in spite of inevitable loss.

When I thought about writing this post, in my mind it went something like: “this is an effective way to deal with loss”. My lost boots and lost branch remind me yet again that losing what you love is hard and there are no short cuts. Nevertheless, dealing with loss effectively is essential if we are to remain alive inside.