1992

At the beginning of 1992, I was sixteen and looking forward to my upcoming German exchange, from February to May. I had either recently published, or was about to publish, my diary in the country's largest newspaper. Socially, it had been a rough year and I was looking forward to leaving for a while.

In May, when I came back, I was 17 and had a fiance. I also had mononucleosis, meaning that I missed most of the rest of the school year too. The signatures in my yearbook were pretty skimpy.

That spring and summer just dragged. I missed Michael greatly. Nearly every day I added to the letters I wrote him, and sent them off once a week. He called me once a week, wrote me once a week, kept taking English classes. And the mono just did not go away. All spring, all summer, I was exhausted. Cranky. Sullen. I kept myself going on cookies and caffeine. And love letters.

Then one week the love letter wasn't there. It wasn't there later that afternoon, either, when I checked again. He didn't call that week. I tried calling him, and it didn't go through. There was never a letter again, never a call. For weeks I kept writing him: "Don't do this to me. You're going to break my heart. Where are you? Are you ok?" I couldn't leave my room, couldn't attend to the most basic matters of daily life, and the goddamned mono just wouldn't go away.

In early August, I went out for lunch with a friend. For desert I had a slice of chocolate cake. "How's Michael?" she asked me.

"Dead," I replied, and kept eating.

"I'm sorry," she said; but I couldn't talk about it much. I didn't actually know that he was dead, but it was the only reason I could understand why he would vanish so suddenly, his phone number disconnected, no trace of him at all. I couldn't talk about him vanishing; it hurt too much. I told people he was dead; except for my parents, who only found out I'd been engaged to him in the first place a few years later, when we were fighting.

For months afterwards I dreamt of him nightly. In those dreams I was walking home from school, wearing shorts on a hot summer day, and his small beat-up blue VW with duct-tape holding the glove compartment together would pull up at the curb. The passenger door would open. "I found you!" he'd say. "I came, I'm here." Every morning I would wake from these dreams, realize all over again that he was really gone and never coming back. Every morning I lost him again.

###

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." Oscar Wilde

###

There was another loss waiting in the wings, in that slice of chocolate cake, the last one I would eat without caring. Which is not to say that there weren't plenty of other sugary treats in the meantime. My parents went away for a weekend, and I had two friends to stay while they were gone. I must have baked five batches of different things for the visit. The craving for sweets was insatiable and constant.

A few weeks later the mono-that-wouldn't-go-away became the diabetes-that-will-never-go-away. What I lost to that afternoon, sitting with my mother in the doctor's office, caring only that my sight would soon come back, I'll never know.

###

"Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight." Marcus Aurelius

###

It was not only dreams of Michael that made the mornings difficult. That fall, a recurring dream I'd had about a stream, and a forest, and a bear and his house full of doors, and a magic room, and a dragon's book, changed. For five years it had remained mostly constant, only the details shifting slightly each time; this time, in 1992, the ending was completely different. I had won, but the Bear had scarred me, and as I looked at the scars in the moments before waking, I'd though, "That's it, I can never go home now." I never had that dream again.

The changed ending haunted me. I knew it meant something but couldn't figure out what.

One day I was in the local library doing research for a school project when I saw a book on dream interpretation sitting on a shelf. Houses were souls. Doors were choices. Streams were journeys. Bears were Satan or Diana, goddess of witches.

It sounds too simplistic and hokey, I know, but it clicked. I knew straight away that it was exactly right. And I was appalled.

I'd grown up in a house full of books about how the modern world was an open invitation to the antichrist, who would surely arrive any day now. About how witches were worshiping Satan whether they knew it or not. I did not want to be a witch.

I fought it for two years. After seventeen years of faithful programming, I truly believed that witches were inherently evil people who would eventually go to hell. Which meant that I was an evil person who was going to hell. Why bother studying in school, then? Why bother being a good person? Why bother following laws and rules, or taking care of my diabetes? What, in the face of this, could possibly matter? Nothing did. That I came out of those two years with my health and my record intact is no minor thing.

But although I fought it for two years, it was decided then. I think there was a part of my subconscious that knew this was the right thing for me, and dragged me along, kicking and screaming, refusing to let me off the hook. I had not been a Sunday christian. I was a fundamentalist, and I meant it. I read the bible every day, I prayed, I bought devotional books, I went to bible camp. I felt bad for using slang (contamination by the modern world! Hastening the end of days!). And the faith that had told me who to be and why, that had given me rules to follow and a reason to follow them, something to work towards, that had formed my personality and politics and values and priorities, died in five minutes on the library floor.

###

"Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun." Hilaire Belloc

###

Michael's loss followed me for a long time. But, by fall, not because I was waiting for him to come back. While the dreams of him finding me continued for years, they soon became nightmares. I've moved on, I don't want you to come back.

What followed me was the raggedness of it, all the raw and bleeding ends left hanging out. What followed me was not knowing what had happened or why. Which meant that while I was still struggling with this, I went ahead and fell in love with someone else. Someone who kissed me at a friend's party, looked deep into my eyes, and told me he hated me.

That I believed. When he told me a few days later that he loved me, I didn't.

How many times I lost him in the years after that point, I could not begin to count.

###

"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.

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

###

On Boxing Day that year, my grandmother died.

It was the first death in my experience where I no longer had any faith in an afterlife. I had lost both grandfathers already, but that was different, everyone--myself included--believed that the separation was temporary. Now everyone around me still believed this, but I did not.

She was a remarkable person. In the months just before she passed on, she took a young single mother under her wings, struggling on welfare, and helped her as best she could. Her husband, my grandfather, fought in the infantry of the second world war and came home with a shrapnel injury and a medal.

She was gone, and I would never see her again.

That was 1992.

###

Not that 1993 and onwards differed significantly. Prior to 1992 I'd had difficulties, but no real sustained and combined losses. My grandfathers had died, I'd been bullied, whatever. But this was when it started to hit one after another, one after another, for years on end.

It looked impossible at the time. I didn't cope with any of it well. And obviously it all could have been much worse. I didn't lose my entire family in a tragic car accident and then receive a fatal cancer diagnosis. Still, it was a lot.

What I took out of that year and the years that followed is a bedrock belief in my own strength, in my ability to handle whatever life sends at me. And a belief that other people, too, are much stronger than they give themselves credit for; anyone can do what I can do, some of them just haven't had to yet.

I learned that when something is determined to be lost, grasping after it just makes it harder and speeds the ending. I've learned, when something seems to be slipping away, to turn my hand up and open my palm, and let it go.

I've learned that the self can die many times before the body does. And that while it's painful, what eventually takes its place is, in most cases, stronger, truer and better than what came before. I've learned that when the house starts to come down, the easiest resolution is to kick out the foundations and wait patiently for what will come after. It's going to happen anyway. Holding on to a house that is rotting out from within just prolongs it.

I've learned that when it seems too much and I feel like I can't cope, to lower my expectations. I don't have to deal with loss gracefully, tactfully, respectably, with strength, pluck, determination, kindness, or optimism. I would like to, but I don't have to. The only thing that I really must do is breathe. Getting to the other side still breathing counts as a success, sometimes. And when something of that magnitude hits all you can do is ride it out--hold on to whatever is nearby that will keep your head above water, don't mind whether it's good or healthy or an appropriate coping mechanism. Just keep your head above water, and breathe. Eventually it passes, and then you can deal with whatever bad habits were exposed or picked up along the way, and fix whatever broke.

I read of an exercise once, where a group's participants were challenged to write down, on ten pieces of paper, ten things they could not bear to lose. And then they were forced to choose--of those ten, which would you give up? Of the nine that are left, which would you give up? Until there was only one left in their hands. Then that, too, was taken away from them. I've tried it myself. It was instructive. Practice losing farther, losing faster.

Ultimately the only thing we own and cannot lose is ourselves, at this very moment. By tomorrow I will already have changed; in ten years I might not be recognizable. Everything else is on loan. I don't own this moment; I will lose it a moment from now. I don't own my health, my brain, my sight, in the sense that they can be lost and I will still be here. That pulsing thread inside, the little voice that says "I," is the only thing I truly own and can never lose (when "I" stops, I won't be here to have lost me).

Like anything else, loss gets easier with practice; unlike most other things, we all get our practice sessions in sooner or later, whether we want to or not.

Posted by Andrea at November 14, 2007 1:57 PM under Me

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