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Learning from loss

As a rabbi, David Wolpe encourages the dying to teach their loved ones how to handle the greatest of all losses — that of life itself. The exercise has an almost miraculous outcome: The dying, often needy, person is transformed into a teacher with a potentially profound message.
Loss can empower and enrich the the physically weak as well, said Wolpe, a rabbi at the Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, who spoke on campus last month at the third and concluding Learn-at-Lunch series on eldercare and aging, organized by the UCLA Staff and Faculty Counseling Center.

His lecture, “Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times,” was full of the kind of paradoxical insights contained in the best of self-help books. When people are faced with a serious illness, they tend to ask why, usually a futile exercise, Wolpe said. “It’s more productive to explain what you can do with the loss you experience and try to make it meaningful.”

A blessing, but only to a point
However, experiencing loss is seldom seen as worthwhile, said Wolpe, pointing to Harold Kushner, author of the acclaimed bestseller, “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.” The author once said that the loss of his adolescent son from an advanced aging disease had made him a more sensitive person and a better rabbi — but that he would give it all up in an instant if he could have his son back.

“So when we tell people that their losses have in one way or another improved them, that doesn’t mean that they’re glad about the loss,” Wolpe said, adding,: “although it is true that an oncologist I know told a patient once that he doesn’t know anybody who survives their cancer and doesn’t bless the cancer.”

Results should be tangible
Part of the task for caregivers is to help the sick make their experiences meaningful, Wolpe said, offering this broad guideline: “If I lose something and that makes me a wiser person, that’s not enough because as long as the meaning of that loss is only what goes on inside of me, it still seems like a net loss in the world.”

For loss to be meaningful, it must enable us in some way to reach outside ourselves, Wolpe said.

That’s one reason why those who establish charities following a bereavement have a “much healthier and more satisfactory reaction than somebody who says, ‘Well, because I’ve lost someone to disease, I now realize that life is fleeting,’ ” Wolpe said, pointing out that such realizations are, ironically, fleeting, too.

Producing a tangible result in the world is “more real to me than if I say, ‘Gee, I really grew from that experience,’ ” said Wolpe, offering the example of his 8-year-old daughter who instinctively understands the worth of measurable results. As the rabbi put it: “Every time she tries on a pair of pants, and they’re too short on her, she really believes me when I say, ‘Oh my God, you’re getting bigger.’ ”

— Ajay Singh