Existential realities are like primal states of being. They are core to who we are and how we act. To understand our existence is to have insight about the emotions we experience and of course, our mental state. Loss is one of these primal states, and its marks on our personal narratives are ubiquitous and often significant. There are the times in which we shiver in response to its lingering touch. From the moment of the neonate's cry for warmth of its mother's womb until the flashes of a life lived and lost in the instant before death. Loss is a statement of our own mortality in which the limits of our lives demand that choices not taken, words not spoken, and opportunities for actions ignored. Loss is the rhetoric that we are constantly in a state of dying. Perhaps the only certainties that I know is that I began and that I will end. In between is a life of action, feeling and thoughts, that are almost always a reaction to the possibility of loss and the impossibility of omniscience and certainty about our world.

Normally, the word loss is associated with death, bereavement, and mourning. But in a sense these three experiences are also relevant to a wider notion of loss: that something or someone undergoes extinction. That an object literally dies and becomes unavailable. It is this unavailability that represents the key definition of loss for me. For neonate, it is the unavailability of the womb and intimate connectedness within another human body. Death is obviously the unavailability of life, and for those who survive one who dies, the unavailability of that relationship.

Bereavement is the experience of loss that Kubler-Ross describes as five step process: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Getting through the bereavement process depends somewhat our relationship to what is lost and how it was lost. The more distant a relationship, the easier to accept its loss. When the relationship is more intense and the loss perhaps unexpected, then we are more likely to challenge and deny reality of its absence and feel anger at our powerlessness to change the situation.

This process of bereavement is not just about a response to a loved one who has died – but to all objects loved and lost. It applies to divorce and a break up of relationships. Parents experience it when their children are growing up, becoming independent and finally leaving home. The process is even felt when we mourn the choice not taken – especially when the choice that has been made did not turn out as we expected.

The very ubiquitous nature of loss means that it lies ever present in out existential realities. I have seen my two year-old daughter go through this very process of bereavement when it is time to go to bed and her toys become unavailable to her.

How to survive such experiences great and small? How will my daughter survive the loss of her toys? To my daughter I offer empathy and a naming of her sad feelings. I offer hope that she will play with her toys again. I distract her from her loss through giving her bottle of milk and reading her a bedtime story. I offer her an understanding that saying “goodbye” is hard.

Is that all, you might ask? Except it is not so easy as you might think. Freud wrote an essay once called “Mourning and Melancholia” in which he explored the notion that mourning is a natural stage of sadness that once passes through at the loss of someone or something important. Melancholia is when we get stuck and are unable to move beyond the boundaries of our sadness caused by the loss. This often happens when there are unresolved feelings, thoughts and questions about the person or object that has become unavailable. In many instances the child with unresolved relationship issues with their parents, who may have escaped far away from the family, may have the greatest hurdles to jump before passing from melancholia to a mourning state.

We all have parts of our lives that are susceptible to the melancholic. Many people, in the beautiful words of Ernest Becker are in a state of “denial of death” seeking to live eternally through the creations of our hands and minds that will survive human mortality. He conceives of mental illness as being the perception that these eternal creations are insufficient to repel off our mortality and our ultimate insignificance in a universe of almost seemingly infinite objects.

And this ultimately is what all of us need to come to terms with. Our insignificance and mortality. If we could live forever, we could achieve everything and anything. Our mortality is the unavailability of being able to do this. This is the example that I use. Suppose I read one book a week for 70 years or so of live – that comes to 3,640 books. That is not so many books. After all one can buy millions of books from Amazon, and probably 400,000 new books are published in English every year. How does one choose which book to read, when there are so many, and yet there is so little time? For each book I read, I have to survive the paralysis of knowing that there are literally thousands of books that I will never be able to read.

I could be intensely sad about my state of being. That however much I think how well read I am, the reality is that there is always so much more to know and understand. That this learning process will never stop until my dying breath. And sometimes I am sad (and frustrated) about it. But I also see it as something inspiring. My mortality tells me that I need to value each moment in my life. Each moment. Each person. Each book. Each opportunity to grow, love and live. That is the gift of our mortality and experience of loss. Ultimately, it gives us meaning each second, minute and hour of our life.