“The God of Loss,” and the Work of Ethical Adulthood

Thoughts on Darlingside’s song, "The God of Loss", 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28KduHrvCxM

There is a quiet layer inside ourselves that rarely gets named. It doesn't always look like grief. It doesn't always feel like sadness. Often it exists so imperceptibly that we do not even notice it's there at all.

Yet it is always there: the steady accumulation of losses that accompany us through life.

A friendship fades. Work shifts. The body changes. A dream that once felt inevitable becomes improbable. Parents age. Certainties loosen. Entire versions of ourselves quietly retire without recognition.

For instance, there’s a part of me that is not aging inside. She says to the mirror, “Hey, I did not order this. I did not approve this change.  I am no longer all right with what has happened.  Who’s in charge here?  I’d like to speak to the manager.”  I guess my inner bossy lady exists even though she’s hardly ever allowed out.

Some days you wake up sad.  Nothing catastrophic has happened, and yet something has undeniably ended. This is the landscape that The God of Loss points toward — not a single tragic moment, but the ongoing human condition of carrying forward after something you thought was stable, has stopped.

One of the central tasks of adulthood lived ethically is learning how to remain present in this condition without becoming hardened or numb. Or silly. Some of us just revert to our adolescent selves and stay there.

Childhood imagines stability: that things will stay recognizable, that relationships will hold their shape, that we will remain who we are. Adulthood gradually reveals something else. Everything is in motion. Every identity is provisional. Every role is temporary.

And yet life does not pause to allow us to mourn each transition. We are asked to continue — to show up for work, for relationships, for responsibilities — even while some internal chapter is quietly closing.

This is why our feelings of loss often go unrecognized. Loss does not always arrive with rituals, funerals, or public acknowledgement.

Lately, for me, it has been arriving privately, not for public view.  It has arrived as the realization that a conversation I once hoped to have will never happen. That a relationship I once hoped could be resolved is over.

It has arrived for me in the past as the awareness that the future I had imagined was no longer in the cards.

Sometimes it has arrived as the momentary recognition that time has passed and a part of me has not caught up to the adjustments that truth requires.

None of these experiences may look like grief from the outside, yet we register them as rupture all the same.

Ethical adulthood does not require eliminating ruptures.

That’s not possible, or realistic.

What it asks instead is the development of internal repair. We learn to feel the fracture, remain steady, and reorganize around what remains. We do not move forward because nothing hurts; we move forward because the capacity to repair ourselves gradually strengthens.

In this sense, the deepest rupture is not external but existential. Each loss reminds us that the localized self — the identity that says “this is mine, this is who I am, this is how I want things to be” — cannot permanently hold reality in place. Life continues moving beyond our preferences, beyond our plans, beyond our attempts at control. Ethical adulthood involves learning how to live at the meeting point between that formed identity and the wider field of life that is constantly reshaping it.

We are the event horizon.

The line where the measurable ends, yet mystery remains

The rupture is the moment we realize we are not in full command. The repair is the moment we discover that we can still participate with dignity anyway.

Power complicates this picture but does not exempt anyone from it. Some people hold tremendous social, financial, or institutional power; others hold very little. Power influences whose losses are seen, whose losses are supported, and whose losses are ignored.

Yet there is one place where power becomes strangely equalizing: the fact of loss itself. Status cannot prevent aging. Authority cannot stop time. Wealth cannot guarantee that love will remain unchanged. The forms of loss may differ across lives, but our capacity to be pierced by absence belongs to everyone.

Recognizing this does not erase injustice — and ethical adulthood requires confronting injustice wherever it appears — but it does reveal something humbling. Beneath our hierarchies and asymmetries, we are all participants in the same disappearing act. Every person you meet is carrying something that has ended. Every adult conversation is happening in the presence of unseen absences.

Grief, then, is not only a reaction to catastrophe; it is a posture toward reality. It is the willingness to feel the tenderness of impermanence without withdrawing from life. The song’s quiet question — what still brings you to the table, what still brings you joy, if you can muster it — becomes the central ethical inquiry of adulthood. Not: “How do I avoid loss?” but: “Given that loss is inevitable, what kind of presence do I choose now?”

And the video deepens that inquiry in a way that feels almost unbearably precise. The filmmaker, Andrew Benincasa, chose stop-motion paper-cutting and puppetry as the medium, explicitly because paper-cutting is “the process of creating by taking away.”   A blank sheet becomes an image through subtraction; shape and story are formed by what is removed.   Which means the video is not simply illustrating loss — it is made out of loss. It becomes a visual metaphor for human experience: the way meaning takes form over time, not because nothing is taken, but because so much is. Benincasa even describes building a rig in his Red Hook studio — light table, overhead camera, a spool feeding a long scroll of black paper (a “crankie,” in shadow-puppetry language) — and then spending long, meticulous days cutting, choreographing, and editing scene by scene.   The result is absolutely heartbreaking to watch: gloriously melancholy, delicate, and devastating in its restraint. It fits the architecture of the song perfectly — and it fits the book that inspired the lyrics too, where one person is trying to preserve his humanity inside forces that keep demanding he surrender it.   It lands with a simple truth that adulthood eventually understands: so much of what we hold dearest is paper-thin, and therefore precious precisely because it cannot last.

The surprising answer is that joy does not disappear in the presence of loss; it becomes more precise.

When certainty fades, attention sharpens. We begin to recognize that conversations matter because they will end, that friendships matter because they will change, that moments of beauty matter because they are temporary. Loss does not only take away; it also clarifies what is still alive. Ethical adulthood means allowing that clarity to guide our behavior — showing up more honestly, loving more deliberately, speaking more carefully — because we know permanence is not guaranteed.

Perhaps the most difficult threshold is learning to act without certainty. Earlier stages of life often depend on the belief that the future can be predicted or secured. Adulthood gradually dissolves that belief. We come to understand that everyone falls eventually, that every structure shifts, that no outcome is completely controllable. At first, this realization feels destabilizing.

And then, with each repetition of the reality of this truth, we loosen. We begin to see that the white-knuckled grip is making things worse, not better.

I am here to tell you: if you stand your ground but let go of the outcome, it becomes liberating.

When certainty is no longer the foundation, responsibility becomes the foundation. We act not because success is guaranteed, but because acting with integrity is still possible.

I asked my dad once, “What’s the meaning of Life?” And he said, “If anything or anyone could tell you that, that would remove your ability to create your own meaning.”

To live ethically, then, is not to win against loss. It is to remain capable of presence after loss, capable of relationship after loss, capable of contribution after loss.

The real measure of adulthood is not how much we manage to keep, but how steadily we continue to participate when keeping is no longer possible.

Loss is not the opposite of life. It is one of the forces that shapes it. And the quiet dignity of adulthood lies in this: we keep taking our seat at the table — not because everything stayed, but because something meaningful still can.

Hope to see you soon,

Andrea