I’ve spent seasons of my life losing things: pagers, cell phones, earrings, earbuds, passports, passwords. It’s neither a newly acquired nor mystifying propensity. In fact, it’s quite routine: monthly, I receive a Facebook message from an incredibly kind stranger who lets me know that they’ve found a piece of me; that they’ll hold it in safekeeping until I reply. And true to the stereotype that such absentmindedness “runs in the family”: it runs in my family.
Maybe it’s not the rate or the range with which we lose things, but the readiness in which we do so that is so staggering. Data from one insurance company survey suggests that the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, which means that, by the time we turn sixty, we’ll have lost up to two hundred thousand things. Throughout the course of our lives, we’ll have spent roughly six solid months looking for missing objects. For my family, maybe longer.
When we lose something, our first reaction, naturally enough, is to want to know where it is. But behind that question of location lurks a question of causality: What happened to it? Such a question matters because it helps direct our search. Just as important, the answers can provide us with that much-coveted condition known as closure. It’s good to get your keys back; better still to understand how they wound up in your neighbour’s recycling bin.
But these questions of causality can also lead to trouble: in essence, they ask us to assign blame. Being human, we’re often reluctant to assign it to ourselves – and, when it comes to missing possessions, it’s always possible (and occasionally true) that someone else caused them to disappear. This is how a problem with an object turns into a problem with a person. You swear you left the keys sitting on the table for your husband; your husband swears with equal vehemence that they were never there; soon enough, you’ve lost your cool, too.
No wonder losing things, even trivial things, can be so upsetting. Regardless of what goes missing, loss puts us in our place; it confronts us with lack of order, loss of control, and the fleeting nature of existence.
In this latest season, though, I’ve learned that death differs from other losses not only in degree, but also in kind. With objects, loss implies the possibility of recovery; in theory, at least, nearly every missing possession can be restored to its owner. That’s why the defining emotion of losing things isn’t frustration or panic or sadness but, paradoxically, hope. With people, by contrast, loss is not a transitional state but a terminal one. Outside of an afterlife, for those who believe in one, death leaves us with nothing to hope for and nothing to do. It’s loss without the possibility of being found.
My aunt – my mother’s twin sister, my second mother – is no longer with us. We lost her, so we say. In the fourth week of June, in 2015, our days grew dark, and I, too, albeit mostly by paying witness to the devastation and deterioration of my mother, was lost: adrift, disoriented, absent. Perhaps, more accurately, I had been at a loss: a strange turn of phrase, as if loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle spins.
Like death more generally, my aunt’s was somehow both readily predictable and existentially shocking. For nine months, following an overwhelming diagnosis of advanced myeloid leukemia, her health rapidly deteriorated. She was, in short, dying. And yet, as I lived abroad, and her hospital visits added up over the months, I gradually curbed my feelings of panic and dread: partly because no one can live in a state of crisis forever, but mostly, because my aunt bore her infirmity with insouciance. “Chemo Tuesday,” she would text, her jovial energy buoyed by the presence of my mom, sister, and our dearest family friends, Abbe and Debbie. The sheer number of times my aunt had overcome cancer’s deleterious effects, perversely, made her (in our very biased eyes) indomitable. After all, she and my mother had talked their way into, out of, and through everything in life, including illness. They kidded, annoyed, complimented, complemented, and utterly adored each other; they were happiest at each other’s sides.
But that fourth week of that June, my aunt was moved to a hospice, and I moved my plane ticket home. I was a time difference too late. If I had been there ten hours earlier, if I hadn’t of been in Europe those last few days, or ever, I would remember my mother cradling the top of her twin’s head in her hand. Sitting by her side, and watching her chest rise and fall with a familiar cadence. It would not be, as they said, unbearably sad; on the contrary, it would be bearably sad: a tranquil, contemplative, lapping kind of sorrow. Without trepidation, without denial, without any possibility of being cared for in return. Just the chance for my mother to be tender toward her half one last time; I imagine that it would be the purest act of love I’d ever seen.
All this makes dying sound meaningful and sweet; and it is true that, if you are lucky, there is a seam of sweetness and meaning to be found within it, a vein of silver in a dark cave a thousand feet underground. Still, the cave is a cave.
So began my second, darker season of losing things. Here, I couldn’t shake the sense that another shoe was about to drop; that at any moment I would learn that someone else to me was sick or had died. For weeks, I slogged on like this, through waves of actual and anticipatory grief. I couldn’t stop conjuring catastrophes, personal, political, environmental, and otherwise. I felt a rising fear whenever my mother didn’t answer her phone, hated to see my fiancé board an airplane, and could barely imagine my sister get on her bike to go somewhere far.
Obliged to carry onward through time, I realized none of us – most specifically, my mother – knew how. I found some consolation in books, but otherwise, for the first time in my life, I did not care to read. Nor could I bring myself to write, not least because anything I shared would be the first my aunt wouldn’t ask to see. I stretched out for as long as I could the small acts that felt easy and right (calling my mother, father, and sister, curling up with my partner, going for a run), but these alone could not occupy the days. Not since the age of eight, when I was still learning to master boredom, had life struck me so much as simply a problem of what to do.
It was during this time that I began to go out looking for my aunt, if only to tell my mother that I had found her. Some days, I merely said to myself that I wanted to get out of the house; other days, I set about searching for her as deliberately as I would go looking for a missing scarf. Grief made a reckless detective of me, and I had thought it possible, in an impossible kind of way, that if I went out looking, I might find myself in her company again. The first time, I turned around after five minutes; I have seldom tried anything that felt so futile. “Lost” is precisely the right description for how I have experienced her since her death. I search for her constantly, but can’t find her anywhere. Grieving becomes like holding one of those homemade tin-can telephones with no tin can on the other end of the string. Her absence is total.
This was perhaps the most striking thing about my aunt’s death and all that followed: how relevant the idea of loss felt, how it seemed at once so capacious and so accurate. And, in fact, to my surprise, it was accurate. Until I looked it up, I’d assumed that, unless we were talking about debit cards or car keys or scarves, we were using the word “lost” figuratively, even euphemistically – that we say “I lost my aunt” to soften the abominable blow of death.
And yet, if anything, our problem is not that we put too many things into the category of loss, but that we leave too many out. One night, during those weeks, on the train from Rotterdam where I was studying, to Luxembourg where I was living, I read Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”. In it, Whitman leans against the railing of a ship, exalting in all he sees. So expansive is his vision that it includes not just the piers and sails and reeling gulls, but everyone else who makes the crossing: those who stood at the railing watching before his birth, those watching around him now, and those who will be there watching after his death, which, in the poem, he doesn’t so much foresee as, through a wild, craning omniscience, look back on. “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,” he admonishes, kindly.
And, just like that, my sense of loss suddenly revealed itself as terribly narrow. What I miss about my aunt, as much as anything, is life as it looked filtered through her, held up and considered against her inner lights. Yet, the most important thing that vanished when she died is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to her, life as it felt for my mom, life as we all live it, from the inside out. All of my memories can’t add up to a single moment of what it was like to be her, and all of my loss pales beside her own. Like Whitman, her love of life had been exuberant, exhaustive; she must have hated, truly hated, to leave it behind – not just her family, whom she adored, but all of it, sea to shining sea. And, above all, I hate that most.
It is breathtaking, the extinguishing of consciousness. Yet that loss, too – our own ultimate unbeing – is dwarfed by the grander scheme. When we are experiencing it, loss often feels like an anomaly, an interference in the usual order of things. In fact, though, it is the usual order of things. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories, the childhood friend, the husband of fifty years, the aunt of forever, the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts.
There’s precious little solace for this heartbreak, and zero redress; we will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is the finding that is astonishing. You meet a man passing through a bar and know within moments you will marry him. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding your calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.
All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence. No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, mother, aunt, uncle, sister, brother, friend, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.
