What One Great Loss Is Teaching Me About How to Live

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.†~Mary Oliver 

I’ve spent much of my life living in fear of countless imagined tragedies—especially the untimely death of those I love.

Growing up, within the span of a few years, three children I was very close to lost one of their parents. The emotional devastation that followed taught me that people can disappear in an instant, shattering a world that had once felt happy and safe. My newfound awareness of the fragility of life led to panic attacks about my own parents dying.

These childhood experiences intensified my terror of death and further cemented the challenging emotional legacy I inherited from my parents: an activated nervous system perpetually primed for disaster.

My mother and father were both Holocaust survivors who’d been orphaned during the war. They’d each lost almost their entire family and every single material possession. The emotional atmosphere in our home was thick with unspoken grief and fear.

To me, death always felt apocalyptic—not a natural part of life. It’s no wonder that I spent decades struggling with intense anxiety about the innumerable catastrophes that could befall me and my family.

But in recent years—thanks to much healing work and a steadfast commitment to practices that calm my nervous system—I’ve been slowly learning to live with more ease.

Then tragedy struck one of my closest family friends. Seth Pollack—wise and wonderful, joyous and generous—was hit by a car during his morning bike ride. He died instantly.

Seth’s wife is my treasured friend, and our lives are closely interwoven. Suddenly, she and her daughters were thrust into a new life of tremendous loss and grief.

Devastated and in shocked disbelief, all my age-old terrors came roaring back. Once again, life felt unbearably painful, menacing, and fragile.

Now, almost a year has passed. While the anguish of losing Seth has not receded, his death, the beautiful way he lived, and the brave and honest way his family has been coping with his absence have all been teaching me important lessons about how I want to live.

Accepting the Truth of Impermanence

My friend’s death proved that although my anxiety about tragic loss has been intensified by trauma, my fears are not irrational. There is no way to guarantee that the people we cherish will be here tomorrow—or that we will be.

The truth is that the terms of being a human on this earth are non-negotiable, and worry is not protective. Constantly fighting against a reality that none of us can change is completely futile.

While knowing that nothing lasts forever can be frightening, it can also awaken us to the preciousness of the life we have right now.

Suddenly, I understood with startling clarity that I have two distinct choices about how to live the rest of my life: remain imprisoned by terror of inevitable loss or let the certainty of impermanence deepen my appreciation of the present moment—not scare me away from it.

Cultivating Presence Instead of Fear

When someone we deeply love and admire dies, they become extraordinarily present in our thoughts, bringing the qualities we most appreciated about them into sharper focus. Their light can even seem to shine brighter and serve as aguide, illuminating the path we want to follow.

No matter how heartbreaking Seth’s sudden death was, everyone who knew him felt that he’d lived a magnificently full and meaningful life—embracing this world’s wonders and pleasures while enriching and uplifting the lives of so many others.

Seth lived with faith, not fear. He would never want his legacy to be that those who loved him became more frightened of living.

His example makes me wonder how I will feel when I look back on my own life. Will I have allowed my worries to steal so much of my peace and joy, or will I have figured out a way to live with more serenity and faith?

Since I’ve never been able to reason myself out of anxiety, I decided to try a new experiment. I asked the frightened parts of myself if they would be willing to put their anxiety aside for just a few hours and try to embody the qualities I found so inspiring in my friend and still feel so strongly despite his physical absence.

I wasn’t demanding permanent change from parts of myself that had spent a lifetime being vigilant. I was simply asking: Could we try presence instead of fear for one afternoon?

For the next few hours, whenever fear arose, I acknowledged it and reassured myself that I could attend to it later—just not right now. Rather than trying to suppress or push fear away, I returned to the present moment, tuning in to the feelings of relaxation and trust I was trying to cultivate.

That afternoon turned out to be one of the most pleasurable I can remember, even though I simply went about my usual routine. Nothing outwardly changed; what changed was my experience of it.

I felt lighter, more relaxed, and more open to pleasure and connection. I could hold my husband’s gaze longer, sing with gusto while walking my dogs, and initiate lengthier hugs.

The Cost of Living in Fear

My experiment helped me understand that fear doesn’t just make me suffer—it closes me off and diminishes how fully I engage with life. Fear narrows my perspective and breeds wariness and suspicion. It directs me toward everything that might go wrong and away from what is actually happening in the present moment.

That one afternoon not only illuminated what fear has been costing me, it also allowed me to taste what’s possible when it no longer co-opts my attention and drains so much of my energy.

While fear insists that I need certainty before I can feel safe, trust lets me participate wholeheartedly in a life that has never offered certainty to anyone.

I’ve been returning to this experiment regularly, and the more often I do it, the easier and more natural it gets. I’m slowly learning that I don’t have to follow fear every time it appears. Life is far more magical and enjoyable without it.

Choosing What to Carry Forward

I have a powerful legacy of fear to contend with, but tuning into my friend’s enduring light and joyous buoyancy is giving me a taste of a much happier way to live. This practice is showing me that deeply ingrained patterns from the past do not need to define me. I have the agency to shape my own future.

Being so close to the type of tragedy that has always terrified me confirmed that we can lose someone we love without warning, and the pain will be devastating. But it also proved that endlessly anticipating that pain will not protect or prepare me, which has weakened some of fear’s hold.

I’m beginning to understand that mortality can teach the opposite lesson from the one fear has taught me for so long. Fear says, “Because I could lose this, I need to constantly brace myself.†But another voice is becoming stronger: “Because I could lose this, I want to fully appreciate it while I can.â€

The inevitability of loss does not need to be an argument for living fearfully. It can be a powerful reason to love more deeply and to savor life more unreservedly.

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