At a loss: Scared and excited

Abstract

Drawing on the author's struggle to come to terms with multiple personal losses, his observations of young children in early childhood classrooms, and work with novice teachers, this essay points to the generative possibilities embedded in moments of disorienting loss. Constrained by traditional templates of mourning that did not reflect the lived experience of on-going grief, he found himself turning to writing as a recuperative strategy that enabled him to better understand what had been and to shed preconceptions of how it should be when we are ambushed by life. At the same time, he was prompted to reflect on the ways that children first begin to use play and spoken language to seek solace and meaning from moments of seeming abandonment. Ironically, coming to embrace and organize pain on paper allowed him to understand how learning lies at the heart of every loss and how new, unfamiliar ways of being in the world can open up even as we grieve the known, familiar and much loved.