“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss,” Judith Viorst wrote in her defense of life’s necessary losses, “and we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.” We know that loving anything or anyone is a contract with loss, and yet we love anyway, our lives a ceaseless osmosis of holding on and letting go, an endless apprenticeship in the art of losing. What we keep of our losses scaffolds who we become. What we let die within us — the tortured patterns, the ill-serving habits, the limiting beliefs — makes it possible to be reborn. And yet it is not easy, letting go of something we have lived with — a love, a dream, an idea of who we are. It can never be willed, only surrendered to, and not without the thrashes of denial, dissociation, and the thousand little lies we tell ourselves in order to hold on. To finally let go is to discover that life holds, that we can be held in something larger than fear, larger than grief, larger than ourselves. Joan Didion (December 5, 1934–December 23, 2021) offers a spare, stirring field guide to doing that in the final pages of The Year of Magical Thinking (public library) — her classic reckoning with grief following the death of her husband of four decades, John Gregory Dunne.Joan Didion, 1977 (Photograph: Mary Lloyd Estrin)Loosening the grip begins with the recognition that there is nothing solid enough in this world to hold on to, that transience is not a defect of things but their fundamental nature. Drawing on how plate tectonics revolutionized our understanding of life, Didion writes:As the grandchild of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter Scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my own house… I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress… A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure… [The island] Oahu, an emergent post-erosional land mass along the Hawaiian Ridge, is a temporary feature, and every rainfall or tremor along the Pacific plates alters its shape and shortens its tenure as Crossroads of the Pacific.When she took her husband’s ashes to St. John the Divine, Didion brought along a lei — the traditional flower garland of the South Pacific, made to be worn around the neck, often given to loved ones arriving or departing. Looking back on her life with John in the idyll of their young love in the Brentwood Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, looking back on her time living and writing in Hawaii, she leans on a poetic native ritual for letting go:During the years when people still left Honolulu on the Matson Lines the custom at the moment of departure was to throw leis on the water, a promise that the traveler would return. The leis would get caught in the wake and go bruised and brown, the way the gardenias in the pool filter at the house in Brentwood Park had gone bruised and brown. The other morning when I woke I tried to remember the arrangement of the rooms in the house in Brentwood Park. I imagined myself walking through the rooms, first on the ground floor and then on the second. Later in the day I realized that I had forgotten one. The lei I left at St. John the Divine would have gone brown by now. Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.The final card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as stand-alone print.The daily deaths of hopes and plans, the failed projects and failed relationships, are our training ground for letting go, a scale model of life’s most difficult losses — the death of a parent, the death of a child, the death of a soul mate. Because the way we meet any death is the way we meet every death, Didion’s reckoning with losing the love of her life maps the disorienting terrain of navigating any loss, letting go of anything that has died, or must die, within us so we may go on living a deeper, truer life. In a poignant counterpoint to Hemingway’s insistence that “no one you love is ever dead,” she writes:I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead… Let go of them in the water.Couple with poet Jane Kenyon on the art of letting go, then revisit Carl Jung on death and how to be more alive.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.