When I think of what I’ve lost, I marvel at the immensity of it. I’ve caught myself more than once listing my losses; not to ruminate or distress myself over them, but to reassure myself that this gut-level grief sits so heavily and so relentlessly for a reason. When I have a tough day, and I wonder, “What is wrong with me?” I list them. It helps me believe there is logic involved, a cause-and-effect pattern resulting in emotional pain that I could not have avoided.
A few years ago, I lost my marriage, my home, my piano, and two dogs within the span of two months. My ex asked for a divorce while I was out of town, and I could never return to my home except as a visitor to collect boxes of things. He kept one of our Chihuahuas, a dog he’d initially promised me; and the dog I had with me, Charlemagne, a four-pounder with the oldest eyes I’ve ever seen, died a sudden and difficult death — pneumonia that developed after an unsuccessful routine surgery.
Over the next few months, I lost my keys several times, to my apartment and to my car. Three times I had to call the locksmith and wait hours to reenter the security of my private space, sitting on the worn burgundy couch in the tiny lobby, crying and wondering what is wrong with me?
I lost my favorite red scarf. Then my second-favorite scarf, gone, disappeared. At the time, I traveled with a small, black, stuffed dog, what my therapist called a “surrogate” for my lost pets. I lost him, in a hotel I think, where I forgot to pull back the white sheets where he’d been waiting. His name was Constantine.
I lost earrings. I lost the entry pass to my building’s garage. I lost my glasses in a university auditorium where I was attending a reading. The administrative head of my department found me on the floor, halfway under a seat, crying and scouring the floor half-blind. She and another employee helped me search with no luck, while I continued to cry, so angry at myself — how did I lose something that’s almost always on my face? I mean, what is wrong with me?
Half an hour later, my glasses turned up at the after-reading reception. A stranger, someone who’s brain I assume is wholly functioning, found them. The relief I felt when I put them on did nothing to dissipate my confusion and despair at my inability to keep things that were important to me. Things I needed.
“What is wrong with me?” I asked my therapist, describing the pain that tore my gut each time something of mine vanished. “I can’t take this anymore. I’m afraid to want anything, to love anything.”
He leaned forward. “Sometimes, when we’re trying to cope with intense and deep loss, our minds externalize it by creating more immediate and tangible losses, like your keys and jewelry and scarves. We create this metaphor for ourselves, losses that are smaller, so we can begin to grasp the huge, seemingly intolerable losses.”
Heat rose in me. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Lose things on purpose? Create even more loss? That makes no sense! Why would my own brain do that to me?” I looked my therapist straight in the eyes. “I hate that idea.”
He was quiet. He tends to go into listening mode when I get angry. He thinks anger is great.
“What a… that’s just a fucking betrayal,” I said. “I can’t imagine anything worse than forcing more pain on myself. Just an utter betrayal by my own brain. This makes me cosmically angry. Like, who can I be angry at? Nobody! Just me! And I didn’t ask for this!”
So we talk about them. Her. The fundamental loss. Fifteen years ago I lost my parents. They’re not dead. I asked my mother to get help for her mental illness or I couldn’t have a relationship with her. She — and my father — chose not to respond. They dropped me immediately and easily. I know I have to stay away from them to survive. I know my life is unquantifiably better without them. But there will aways be a ragged hole in my psyche where they should have been, even if it’s the best outcome.
“But what about Constantine,” I said. “Come on, I loved that little fake animal. Why would I want to lose him? What could I possibly get from that, for fuck’s sake?”
Something I like to forget: forty years ago, as a child, I lost my dog, a silky, red, miniature dachshund. He was not yet two years old. I came home from school to find that my mother had taken him to the vet and had him put down. He was getting mean, she said. She knew that dog didn’t have single mean impulse in his body. She didn’t want him around anymore, that’s all. If I’m being truly honest, it’s that she didn’t want me to have him. It’s also why, over the years of my childhood, all of my cats “ran away.”
Lately I’ve been wondering how much of my identity is informed by loss, especially when I consider the blood disease I’ve lived with my entire adult life, the disease which caused the loss of the life I’d hoped for. I can’t work full-time due to chronic fatigue and pain. I’ve adapted over the years and I’ve found ways to thrive despite it. I believe in adaptation, in shifting onto a new path when change knocks us onto the curb. But it is harder than I like to admit, and much harder in the last few years.
So how much does loss define me? After all, this grief is dependable and accessible. It’s my always-available companion. When I consider that, perhaps, I’m defined by what I have, it doesn’t make sense. Whatever I have, including myself, can be lost, and ultimately will be. This is not a tragedy, it’s the human condition.
How small my life has become, without my partner and my dogs and my home and my health. A small life is just as good as a big life. This does not bother me. But this grief is so large, I’m not sure I can fit it into this little space.
I don’t understand all that has brought me here. Some of the biggest losses were choices, others were the choices of others or of no one, just artifacts of fate, by which I mean chaos, by which I mean the unpredictable and uncertain events that, strung together, we call life.
Perhaps I am not truly defined by my losses, but by the resulting grief, or how I deal with this grief. But this implies some kind of morality, that there is some right or wrong way of handling grief. Perhaps it is how loss deepens my sense of empathy, my patience, my understanding of how all humans are bound together. Loss is what we all have in common. We don’t all know happiness, but we all know pain.
Loss is simply an inevitable fact of human existence. It is not inherently bad, but to me, it is inherently painful. Pain does not equal bad, but it certainly equals pain. There is some pain I know will not go away. The wounds are too big and the memories too vivid.
When I write about loss, I’m simply fabricating a narrative out of the inexplicable; an externalization that allows me to grasp its immensity, its pain, its humanity. The writing itself stands as a metaphor for the mess of grief that churns in me. Like losing keys stands in for losing a husband, or a dog. Or a home.
