Making a Loss Inventory

One of the earlier homework assignments in David Kessler's excellent Grief Educator Training is to create your own Loss Inventory. It is a very helpful exercise for taking a step back and looking both at how loss shows up in our lives, as well as how we have navigated loss in the past. My decision to take the training was in an interesting context. My brother had died by suicide about 6 months earlier. That was not the reason I was most conscious of, however. Before my brother's passing, a coaching colleague of mine had taken the training much earlier, and he was an advocate. I had coached some clients who were working through grief, and our engagements had gone well. I felt like this was an area where my call to service was particularly resonant. So I had planted the seed that I would take Kessler's training soon after I retired from high tech, which was looming about a year away. But I have to admit, I'm not all that reliable about such plans.

My brother passed away before I retired, and suddenly my post retirement plans were consumed by my role as trustee of his estate, in addition to the emotional work of grieving. Consciously, if someone asked me before the training, I might have said that my brother's death slowed me down. But as I worked through the training, I found it very helpful. Now, as I reflect, I feel that it's just quite possible that, in the absence of my brother's death, I would have drifted away from the idea of Grief Educator Training. So at this point, I simply accept the way that things have unfolded, and acknowledge that the training was helpful for my personal grief work as well as for enhancing my skills as a coach.

In the same week that David Kessler assigned us the Loss Inventory homework, he also shared his own loss inventory. In a similar vein, I am sharing my Loss Inventory here. David had recommended identifying ten losses. I came up with eleven and briefly debated with myself which item to drop, then I realized that the precise number was not the point of the exercise. Ten is a good round number. Five feels a little low and twenty seems a bit high, but if those are what you come up with, that can be an okay place to start. Not all loses are deaths, of course. My list serves as an example, and also tells you something about me.

• I went into foster care (loss of living with my mother), early 1960 

  • Although I recall images of the foster care home. I can't recall the feeling of loss.

• My father came back into my life briefly, then left and died by suicide, March 1967

• My first serious girlfriend broke up with me, 1976

• My mother was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease), 1980

• My mother died, April 1985

• My first wife and I filed for divorce after twenty years, Nov 1999

• My sister died, March 2012

• My second wife and I separated permanently after almost 20 years, June 2022

• My brother's wife died in my arms, April 2022

• My surrogate father (who I met when I was 10) died at 100, September 2023

• My brother (whose wife died above) died by suicide, April 2025

As you can see, I have lost parents, siblings and long-time spouses. I have not experienced the loss of a child, as many others have.