Loss

Ten years ago this month I lost my father. I didn’t really lose him, I knew exactly where he was, but loss is a good way to describe the sensation. I had a thing (a great relationship with a great dad), and then I lost it.

This was a turning point in my life, and I recognized it, if not consciously. The fortyish years of my life to that point were the story of gaining: the body growing stronger, the mind quicker, the bank account fatter, the friend count higher, the family larger. The next umptyish years were (and are) going to be about losing.

These are all personal losses and the charmed life I had led to that point had readied me, somewhat at least, for losses like that. Your life is a hill: you crest that hill and then you descend into a valley.

Eight years ago today I enumerated my anxieties in the wake of an election. We had a respite for a few years but those anxieties, to a number, are the same today as they were then. But this time at least it isn’t a shock. We knew this was always a possibility. Cancer recurring is easier to wrap your head around than cancer appearing. I only wish it had appeared ten or twenty years earlier, when my personal life was gliding upward, not downward.

But I am tired of losing, of having things disappear from my life. Personally, or out in the rest of the world. I am gripped with a terrible nostalgia for the time in my life when I was at (or perhaps just nearing) the crest of my life’s hill.

I am a regretful person, in idle moments (in the shower, usually) I replay moments of my life: if I had done this one thing differently, how would the rest of my life have played out? This is such a stupid practice: my life was (and is) charmed. If I had done that one thing differently, my life wouldn’t be the way it is today, which is so nearly perfect.

The past, it seems to me, is more fluid than the future. The future is blank, unknowable, a room full of objects behind a closed door. They are already there. When we open the door we will find those objects, fixed. Behind us is a room full of objects we already know, how easy it should be to simply rearrange them! If I just moved this one object on the shelf labeled “October, 1997” I can guess pretty well how it would affect nearby objects, all the way up to the doorway marked The Future.

I am tired of losing. No: I am tired of gathering the energy I need to deal with losing. It was nice, at least, to have four years where I mostly didn’t have to deal with the rest of the world, and focus on what I am losing closer to home.

That is my only way through I see now: what I can hold or even gain here, close to my home.