Language Matters
I was a lazy language learner. At this point in my life, that acknowledgment is something I can own. School wasn’t particularly difficult for me. Mostly, I made A’s, some B’s, and aside from the complicated relationship I had with grade school Social Studies and the D in penmanship in 6th grade (which to this day makes me grateful for keyboards), learning wasn’t difficult for me. I grew up in a small, rural upper Midwest community, with hard-working parents who loved us clearly and wonderfully. They scraped their way through life below the official poverty line, somehow stretching their dollars far enough to give my two siblings and me all the opportunity and material sustenance we needed and then some. But it was the upper Midwest of the 1960s and ’70s, and there were fewer than 10,000 people in our county. The rest of the spectacular multicultural, multilingual world we now call home hadn’t yet made it to Benzie County. We spoke English. And if you met someone who spoke a little bit of Spanish or French, it was usually because they took a year of “foreign language” in high school. If they were fluent in something other than English, they definitely “weren’t from around here.”
Even though my view of the world and appreciation for culture and language diversity grew through college, I was never as aware of the importance of language as when I landed in Indonesia in the mid-’90s with my wife and two young children. We were hoping to be there for years, so learning to communicate effectively was a priority. While many locals were gracious and patient with us as we fumbled through our language and culture classes, there was a clear language barrier that needed to be addressed. As we learned Bahasa Indonesia, we were often forced to use vocabulary that was imprecise or borrowed to communicate with those around us. When we didn’t know how to express something in our new language, we would borrow something from our old language or gesture, point, etc. all with varying degrees of success. The results of our appropriations ranged from humorous to mildly embarrassing, providing ample opportunity for laughter and humility.
I learned then what I still believe now. Language matters. And if we want to effectively communicate, convey ideas and concepts, and develop a shared understanding, we need appropriate vocabulary and at least a basic, shared understanding of the meaning of those relevant words, ideas, and concepts. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to communicate without a shared language, but a common language usually makes the process easier.
These admitted presuppositions have brought me to observe a language gap related to the experience of loss. If you are like most people, you are not unfamiliar with loss. We all have experienced loss of one type or another. Sometimes loss barely catches our attention, while at other times, it splits our world completely and irrevocably in pieces. And in between those extremes, loss impacts us in ways that are as unique and as complex as we each are unique and complex. The loss moments may present as the loss of an item, a person, a relationship, a job, a sense of security, safety, or life direction. These myriad loss moments shape us in obvious and not-so-obvious ways, weaving our experiences and relationships together, tearing them apart again, and creating new bonds and new fabrics.
And yet, when we read or talk about loss, it seems the natural centralized focus of most research and language is developed around what is for many people the most extreme, most painful type of loss. Death. It’s understandable that our conversation might begin there because for most people it is the most obvious example to illustrate the concept. The death of a loved one is often an earth-shattering moment, a loss with an irreversible finality that tears at the core of who we are and what we most value. It calls into question, or at least sober conversation, issues of ultimate concern. Who are we? Why are we here? What happens when we die? And other important questions.
Because of the severity and dramatic impact of this type of loss, it isn’t surprising that death commands our attention and dialogue. Nor is it surprising or inappropriate that a focus on understanding and describing grief would be a natural and necessary outgrowth of these concerns. But the problem is that “grief” and “loss” are not synonyms. They are neither the same event nor the same experience. While grief will often follow a significant loss, and loss is usually a trigger for what we describe as grief, they are not always life partners. Some argue that loss is the event and grief is the following experience, but that is not always the case. Sometimes we experience loss without any discernable sign of grief. And sometimes we find ourselves grieving without being able to pinpoint a loss that triggered those emotions.
This brings me back to the title of this blog post. Language matters, and if we are to discuss, analyze, evaluate, and negotiate an experience as ubiquitous as loss, we need some common vocabulary, syntax, and descriptors that explicitly target that experience. We need to value the experience of loss as a unique, important part of the human experience and acknowledge the way it shapes and molds each of us.
It’s not enough to just appropriate the language of grief and use that to talk about loss. Grief language itself is appropriated from “similar but different” research in a much more dramatic way than most people know. The experience of loss demands our attention especially given the global impact of pandemic-related losses that surround us like slow drifts after a winter blizzard. We need experience-appropriate structures, trauma-informed knowledge, and holistic, practical strategies that can help us more effectively navigate our own unique but connected pathways through loss.
Loss matters. It impacts our body, our mind, our relationships, and every part of our world. It’s time to develop dedicated vocabulary and syntax, build better structures, and more effective treatment strategies that will allow us to talk about loss with a common understanding. The sooner we understand loss as a unique experience, the sooner we will be able to address a significant gap in understanding ourselves.
Steve Johnson, President/Co-founder, PathLights, llc.