Every Transition Begins With an Ending

I lost both my parents by the time I was 35. 

My parents loved Holy Cross. I still remember visiting Mount St. James as a prospective student, nestled in chairs in a sunny Rehm Library, listening to an admissions presentation about how Holy Cross educates students as whole people. On the car ride home to Connecticut, my dad couldn’t stop talking about it. “This place does something different,” he said. “It’s not just about the classes; it’s about the education of the whole person.”

My beloved father passed away in July 2020 at the age of 82. The weeks and months that followed were full. I was stretched to the limits as a daughter, wife, mother and working professional – a member of the quintessential “sandwich generation,” as I came to understand – pulled between the caregiving needs of my two young children and of my mother, who we discovered was fighting her own quiet battle with Alzheimer’s disease. 

Like two support beams leaning against each other to remain standing, without my dad, my mother’s decline accelerated rapidly. I lived in both a state of grief from losing my father, and in a state of “anticipatory grief” – a term I learned from an Anderson Cooper grief podcast – as each day I lost more and more of my mother.

Amidst this grief journey, an email arrived from Holy Cross in fall 2021 inviting me to attend a weekend alumni retreat, “Finding God in Life’s Transitions.” Upon opening the email, I felt a lump form in my throat. Could this finally be a chance to take care of myself? I forwarded the email to my husband, Jeff Luoma ’09, and within minutes, being the rock that he is in my life, he replied, “Please, go for it!” A few weeks later, I hopped in my car on a Friday afternoon in November and drove to Holy Cross’ Thomas P. Joyce ’59 Contemplative Center in West Boylston, Massachusetts. 

The retreat was a lively group of about 40 participants, including some dear old friends of mine – a fellow science-loving classmate in Lindsey Tonge ’11; an inspiring chaplain in Meg Fox-Kelly ’99; and a lifelong spiritual director in Rev. Jim Hayes, S.J. ’72. The evening began … with endings. Our retreat leader, Julie Dowd ’94, introduced us to our weekend theme of transitions and helped us explore endings as inflection points – places where determinations must be made between what we’re losing and what we’re keeping. Sometimes these decisions are made for us; sometimes we make them for ourselves. 

I’ll be honest: I signed up for the retreat not quite thinking about its theme. I merely saw the opportunity to return to a place I loved – with people I loved – to take some quiet time to heal, to rest, to recover. But during the retreat, I found each mention of the word “ending” to be more and more illuminating, almost jarring, each triggering the recognition of another ending in my life. I realized with sharpened focus that I was in the midst of many endings.

Through retreat talks and reflections, Julie introduced us to the work of William Bridges – and no exaggeration – it changed my life. Bridges argues in his book, “Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes,” that “every transition begins with an ending.” He describes transitions as “the difficult process of letting go of an old situation, of suffering the confusing nowhere of inbetweenness, and of launching forth again in a new situation.” In other words, all transitions are composed of first, an ending; then, a neutral zone; and finally, a new beginning.

As I met with Fr. Hayes for spiritual direction, with a backdrop of Massachusetts trees having just lost their leaves, I realized with certainty I was in the winter of the neutral zone. There is a beautiful poetry in connecting the language of transitions to the language of seasonal changes. If endings are fall, when leaves die and growth often stops, and beginnings are spring, when new growth emerges, awakened by bursts of light, then the neutral zone is winter, when the ground lies fallow for a seemingly indeterminant amount of time – quiet, still, waiting. In the midst of my winter, Fr. Hayes planted the most essential seed by asking me, “Have you seen any new growth following Dad’s death?”

I began to intentionally look for buds of new growth. Just a few weeks after the retreat, two people sent me the same job posting at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Having spent dedicated time reflecting in the neutral zone, especially on that retreat, I felt more aware. More responsive. More observant. More in tune with the possibility that something was stirring inside me. So, I applied, I was offered the job and I accepted. In the months and years that followed, my fellow alumni retreatants and I stayed in touch via an email thread, a recurring reminder to me to stay vigilant in my search for new growth. 

Another bud emerged in 2024, when I was invited to give a talk at a Sacred Heart University faculty and staff retreat; as a blank Word document sat before me, I couldn’t help but title my reflection, “Centering Ourselves in Life’s Transitions.”

Following my mother’s death, another bud arose as I began writing poetry about losing her, deeply inspired by the work of Maya Angelou. And yet another bud appeared when I applied for my town’s poet laureate role; this flowered into the creation of “Poetry for Grief” workshops held at local libraries in collaboration with the exceptionally talented poet Elaine Nadal.

I have come to recognize that my new growth – my spring – is a vulnerable willingness to share my seasons of grief with others. It is my hope that when we explore experiences of grief together, especially amid times of polarized discourse, we remind ourselves of our shared experiences, and most importantly, our shared humanity.

With every season of loss, I have learned more deeply what it means to be whole.

Elizabeth Morse Luoma ’09 is executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Sacred Heart University, poet laureate for the town of North Haven, Connecticut, and a firm believer in the transformative power of a liberal arts education.