Love, Loss, and the Water Between

At the heart of “Life’s Ups & Downs” is a simple image: we are all moving through a cosmic ocean.

I wrote the original poem about twenty years ago. Its outlook was hopeful and expansive: life as changing water, with storms and calm, solitude and companionship, grief and renewal, all part of the same journey.

Sometimes we struggle to stay above water. Sometimes we float effortlessly beneath a clear sky. We swim alongside people we love, spend stretches alone, lose companions along the way, and continue toward shores we cannot yet see.

In 2025, the poem became the Dust & Clay song “Journey by Water.” The metaphor became movement. The poem’s storms, currents, horizons, friendship, solitude, grief, and renewal became a musical journey whose central impulse is to keep swimming.

“Loss Adjacent” came from a very different place.

I began writing it during a pet grief support group, about one month after losing my 16-year-old cat. Where the original poem had been written from a place of broad hopefulness, this newer piece came from the immediacy of grief.

Rather than asking how we move through life, it pauses to consider what it means to love anything within a life that is temporary.

Love exists between a before and an after.

Before we knew someone.
While we had them.
After they are gone.

In that sense, love is always loss adjacent. Not because love is inherently tragic, but because to love something finite is also to accept, knowingly or unknowingly, that our time with it cannot last forever.

The water metaphor of “Life’s Ups & Downs” offers a way forward. Those we lose do not simply disappear from the journey:

“Their memories carry us forward like a gentle current.”

“Loss Adjacent” looks at the same experience from the other direction. Its grief is not only something that carries us forward; it is love continuing to reach toward what was there before.

The two ideas coexist.

Memory is the current carrying us forward.
Grief is the current pulling at what lies behind.

And perhaps a human life is lived somewhere between those forces.

Looking back across the timeline of these works, the contrast feels especially meaningful.

“Life’s Ups & Downs,” written roughly twenty years ago, looks toward the horizon with optimism.

“Journey by Water,” created in 2025, turns that philosophy into motion and song.

“Loss Adjacent,” written after the death of a beloved companion of sixteen years, is more intimate and immediate. It does not begin with the horizon. It begins with the empty space beside you.

Yet the pieces are not in conflict.

The younger poem says: keep swimming.

The later grief song says: notice who was swimming beside you.

One looks forward. The other looks back. Both are held together by the same idea: love changes form, but it does not become unreal simply because time moves on.

“Life’s Ups & Downs” ultimately answers uncertainty with the present moment and the promise of another wave.

“Loss Adjacent” offers a quieter consolation: an ending cannot erase what existed before it.

Together, the works trace a small philosophy of impermanence:

Life changes.
We keep swimming.
We love others along the way.
We lose some of them.
And somehow, their love becomes part of the current that carries us onward.