The Hole I Walked Past — Grieving a Loss You Were Relieved By

Not every hole is dug by a death. Some of them you walk straight past without noticing, because the loss came dressed as good news.

The loss that came dressed as good news

I played golf in college, at the University of Portland, on a scholarship. By my second year I hated it. It had turned into a job, and the job took whatever joy the game had once held for me. I was close to quitting, which really meant leaving the school, because without the scholarship I could not afford to be there. And then, out of nowhere, the program got canceled. I could keep the scholarship, stay at Portland, and never play golf again.

It was everything I would have asked for. The relief was immediate and enormous. I was so happy to be handed permission to set down the thing I had come to dread.

What I did not see coming was what happened next.

My schedule opened up. All at once there was time, for a job, for my studies, for working out who I wanted to be socially, all of it. It should have been the good part. And when I actually stepped into it, I felt completely lost. The only way I knew how to live was pulled in two directions at once, caring hard about school while golf yanked me the other way, racing between classes and practice and studying, never a spare hour, never any time alone with myself. Now there was nothing but time, and I had no idea what to put in it. I remember people asking me what my hobbies were, and I remember the panic of having no answer. I did not know who I was without the thing I had just been so relieved to lose.

I did not understand that there was anything there to grieve. Because I had wanted it gone, because losing it was a relief I had chosen, it never once occurred to me to call it a loss. There was a hole in the ground where the game had been, and I walked straight past it, because a hole you were glad to climb out of does not look like a hole. It looks like open air. So I kept walking, for years.

What was waiting under the relief

I only went back to it much later, after Dan, once grief had taught me how to step into a hole instead of around it. And when I finally did, the first thing waiting in it was the resentment. How much golf had taken from me. How little I had enjoyed those last years of it. How much it had kept me from the things I thought I wanted to be doing instead. I had to sit in that resentment for as long as it needed, the same way I later had to sit in the anger at Dan.

Because underneath the resentment, once it had been felt the whole way through, was the love. And I could not have reached the love without going through the anger first. Golf taught me discipline, the real kind, not the restriction I have spent so much of my life untangling from, but the true kind, time and dedication put into something day after day and then proving itself in competition. It taught me I was capable of that. It put me outside, in nature, alone, for hours, which is where a lot of my love of being outdoors comes from. It taught me to sit with myself and steady myself through big emotions, the swing from playing beautifully to playing terribly and back, all of it on my own, getting myself to a clear enough place to keep playing well. The game gave me all of that. And I could not see a bit of it while I was only relieved to be free of it.

Both at once, again. The resentment and the love, held in the same hand, for a thing that was never a person and never died. I only had to be willing to step into the hole I had been so glad to walk past.

You were never meant to grieve alone. And not everything you grieve is a person. Some of it is a version of yourself you set down, and were relieved to, and needed, years later, to finally turn around and mourn.

I wrote a longer teaching about this pattern, why relief seals a loss and what it takes to turn around, called The Loss Dressed as Good News. It lives in The Container on Patreon.

And if a loss of your own has been waiting, I write five short letters for the griever you are right now, one a day, free. Get the letters.