The difference between sadness and loss

I am very familiar with sadness. It’s a feeling that wraps itself around my neck to choke me and makes my head throb filling my eyes with tears. That is sadness for me. I feel it a lot.

Loss is something completely different, and while I describe it as sadness, that isn’t really accurate. Loss is a feeling in my chest that makes me exhale longer and inhale deeper. It’s hollow and it too is heavy. I don’t feel loss as often as I feel sadness. I felt loss when Fluffs passed away in December. I’m also woken up from dreams because of it. Most notably has been a version of the same dream involving people in my past.

The dreams are of me visiting with parents of someone that I was close to. In the dream I hear them explain who I am looking for is not “there”, and I know that they mean that the person I am looking for is not currently home, but something in the dream makes me understand that the person is gone forever. I am never sure if they are dead, or just gone out of my life (my emotions don’t know the difference). It’s just then that loss pummels me repeatedly with each breadth and causes me to wake up.

Loss is not sadness in that it doesn’t make me want to wallow or cry. There is a sort of resignation that comes with loss. The thing is that loss is hardly ever present without sadness, but they are different feelings.

There have been other times when loss has had a significant impact on me. Just before I asked Beth to marry me I dreamt that I was marrying Hilary instead and loss woke me with that hollow feeling in my chest at the realization that I had lost Beth for good. The most significant memory of feeling loss was the night I watched my dad’s car make a right turn and drive in a different direction away from the bus that mum, my sister and I were in.

When I wrote this, I was listening to this:

One of the more obscure songs by Paper Lace.