Functional Loss

Excerpt from “Grief is Holy: A Practical Guide to Grieving with God”:

This loss primarily has to deal with the functionality of the body. Physically or mentally, the capacity you once had is either diminished, limited, or completely gone. Your ability to perform what used to be basic activities of daily living (ADLs) is compromised, and what used to be easy and normal for you to do is now a challenge or impossible. The desire to go back to the function that your body used to have, while also holding that it may never return to what it was, is a loss that can cause grief.

You remember what it used to be like and how you didn’t need to depend on anyone else to do what you needed to do. Now it’s like you’ve reverted backwards to being a child again, needing help for things you at one point could have done on your own. This loss often comes with age, but that’s not the only time it shows up. If you were in an accident and your body is still suffering the effects of that, or your cognitive abilities have declined and you’re concerned it’s evidence of a larger problem… functional loss doesn’t always have an age connected to it.