When preparing to blog, I tend to start with what’s present for me in the moment and I was surprised this evening to discover that what’s present for me is a sense of loss. There were some obvious and unsurprising memories that surfaced when I keyed in on this awareness, but I also sensed the little losses and the good losses, like those one incurs simply by growing up.

It feels like a contended mindfulness of loss.

In End of the Summer, one of my favorite songs by Dar Williams, she perfectly and poetically expresses this feeling for me:

It’s the end of the summer, you can spin the light to gold.

Loss is a part of the human story. Sometimes we feel it tear through us. Sometimes we ignore it. And sometimes, we set up a lawn chair next to it with a warm smile, offer it a glass of sweet tea and say howdy.

Last Friday, my husband and I – a one-car family – traded in our 1997 Saturn SL with 211,338 miles. We’d purchased it used in 2002 just before we’d gotten married and held onto it for so long for one primary reason: the damn car just wouldn’t die. But there were other reasons, too. It still averaged 30 mpg. It was made of plastic so you could just pop any dents out. We hadn’t had a car payment in four years and our insurance payments were lower than our cell phone bills.

In other words, the utility of the car outweighed the lack of power locks and windows.

Until one day it didn’t.

My husband’s tipping point occurred years earlier, I’m sure. Mine revealed itself this January when the cloth seat cover on the driver’s side became so worn that the yellow foam began peeking through and I realized I owned shoes that cost more than the trade-in value (to be clear: one quote for the value of the car was $75).

So we did a serious upgrade and last Friday purchased a 2005 Volvo S40.  Not only does its status as a used car mean it’s low in VOCs, but it has power locks and windows, is absolutely gorgeous and was secured for just under the amount we’d decided to spend.

But let’s get to the heady title of this post. I was listening to Lynn Twist give a talk months ago about the opportunity within the global financial crises. She commented that we needed to hospice the old structures and the old way of being before we embarked on a new way of doing things or established new structures.  It’s imperative that we intentionally walk “the old way” to its death.

I love this paradigm and find myself applying it to my life and to my clients’ lives frequently. The car purchase was no different and so we put the Saturn in hospice care. We cleaned out the miscellany in the trunk and organized the important papers in the glove box. We made calls to our insurance company and took some pictures.

Most importantly, on the way to the Volvo dealership, Scott and I reminisced about the Saturn. We surfaced memory after memory of the car, noting how frequently it was a part of our important moments. It was our first big purchase together. It traveled with us across the country. It took me back and forth to my first office job. It hosted an endless number of arguments and life-changing conversations. It kept us safe on the road for eight years.

Change – even the best kind of change that comes with upgraded safety features and a really sexy body – requests that we be intentional. That we honor what was. That we be compassionate toward that with which we are parting and take care of ourselves in the process. That we truly say goodbye.

I’m going to start looking around a little more thoroughly to see areas of change in my life that need some hospice care – the letting go of old habits or beliefs, physical changes in my environment, outdated ways of conducting business – and see what I can do to honor their passing. I am certain I will be able to move forward more fully as a result.

What about you? What changes in your life need some hospice care?