Failing at the Art of Losing

In which things go missing.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

- Elizabeth Bishop

Suddenly and recently, I am obsessed with finding lost objects. My sister sends my daughter a ring, an inexpensive little trinket, and a day later it disappears. I search compulsively – I know it has to be somewhere in or near her room! – and fail and search some more and fail. I sob with frustration.

A day later, my youngest finds it accidentally, and the relief that washes through me takes my breath.

Next, my accidental finder loses her own bracelet – a gift from her father and me. Again, I turn the house upside down, looking. Again, I am flooded by despair at the loss of this small, cheap thing.

My oldest is the one who finds it this time, buried inexplicably in the children’s costume box.

This is the theme of my days now – loss, grief, occasional recovery, loss…

In the year after my mother died, I lost my wallet four times. Four times it came back to me, and never with anything missing more than a little cash and a credit card used only for someone’s train fare. The last time it goes missing long enough that I have to get a new driver’s license, two weeks after the birth of the daughter we have named in honor of my mother. If ever a DMV mug shot showed exhaustion and despair and elation all at once, that photo was it.

It’s no accident though. I never obsess like this when times are good. I never lose like this. And the parallel is obvious: I search for the tangible things that go missing and my madness illuminates all the losses that cannot be searched, all that’s missing that cannot be found.

Since late winter of last year, like so many of us, the intangible losses have accrued faster than I can even absorb them. Blindsided by a pandemic none of us should have been blindsided by, the first thing that goes is my nascent mediation practice. Come March 16, I’m home full-time with my three girls, and the foundation I’ve been digging fills with loose soil, until the only thing I have left is a silent website, a phone line that only transmits calls from people in search of someone else, and a box of business cards that won’t ever be used.

That loss, while personal, is not strung through my heart on barbed wire. So many others are piercing pains at the center of all I love.

We all have bruises. We all will scar. You understand.

One loss: my marriage. It was ending anyway, but that’s no consolation. My husband moves out in June, the final agreement is signed in early October, the divorce is finalized a few days after the new year. Before and between those dates, a world of hurt. So goes seventeen years of history, swirling away in the chaos of this moment in time. I am prepared for this loss, and have agreed to it, and in the end what I feel is relief more than sorrow. But as with any loss, my thoughts are pinned to wondering about what could have been but wasn’t, about how the Fates threaded the needle of my life, about all of the varicolored strands in that string, about whether the needle’s eye is impossibly small or incredibly vast.

Also lost: the ease of watching my three sunny daughters twirl happily through their blossoming lives. My oldest is consumed by anxiety, jolted by middle-of-the-night panic attacks that bring her dinner up, and leave her shaking like a china cabinet in an earthquake. My middle child – extroverted, wildly creative, who fills up every room she enters with her spirit – is suddenly, almost as soon as the pandemic hits, in dire emotional distress. First there is a therapist, then a psychiatrist. The medications have scary names. The story of her life, perhaps from here until the last chapter, takes a terrifying and dark turn. My youngest is mostly spared, but her sadnesses emerge in story themes, and flights of imagination that let her express what she’s not ready to say herself, out loud.

And: In a heartbeat we lose our weekly visits with my dad, who lives close by and needs our company more than anything else in this world. Zoom is useless. He might as well live on a different continent, and I haven’t hugged him since March. I love him more than there are words in the dictionary, but what use is that, if I can’t care for him the way I need to?

And of course, and of course, the losses and the traumas of the Trump reign of terror, all avalanching down in his final year with a sickening force, and the clenching anxiety of the election, the unabated fear thrumming like a plucked guitar string tuned to the key of suffering, straight through from November 2016 to this very moment – this very moment because the trauma encompasses too the wild letting-go, the knee-buckling collapse, the gutting release of January 20th, and the post-traumatic stress that has followed…

I have no words for all the rest of my disappeared intangibles and separations, which range in effect from a bit of unpleasant life weather to a heartache as harrowing as a shipwrecking storm summoned by raging Poseidon himself. But I do not have to tell it all, as I’ve yet to meet the person untouched by loss in this maelstrom year. My travails aren’t much compared to some, but even those relatively unscathed are only relatively so. We all have bruises. We all will scar. You understand.

And so, with all the weight hanging on my heart these gutting days, is it any wonder that I hunt maniacally for the touchable things, the things that can be held and kept? Why not put all of my anguish and all of my hope into finding a little silver ring, shaped like a sloth, which brought my depression-felled little girl so much joy? Who’s to say that it is not a small, round key to happiness? Who’s to say it’s not worth the wild search? The elation I feel when my youngest accidentally discovers it and holds it up triumphant is so transcendent, I completely forget that this exquisite happiness started in the valley of my despair. The ring is found. That is all that matters.