Lost and Found

It happens to all of us. That sickening feeling when you lose a precious thing. A thing you loved. A thing from which you derived so much joy and happiness. A thing you convinced yourself you could never live without.

It happened to me so many times. And with it, the sinking heart, the welling tears, the panic, and feeling of pure helplessness. God, how I loathed loss. But life doles out grace one loss at a time. Don’t get me wrong. Loss can still slice me in half. But the searing pain of loss, when we were young, gives way to the grace of acceptance. And the sense of inevitability.

We learn the hard way that loss is universal. When a parent dies, so many other people can relate. Divorce is devastating. But hardly an isolated experience. What we fear losing changes as we do because what matters to us changes.

I was heading home for the holidays when I was pickpocketed at Montreal airport. My wallet had my ID and $150 cash in it. All my Christmas money. I was inconsolable. I got through Christmas somehow and returned to school. Weeks later, my cash light wallet showed up in my mailbox. The thief had been gracious enough to only lift the money and return the ID. Gotta love a crook with a heart.

The loss of friends turned out to be way harder. A group of us sat around a residence cafeteria breakfast table in stunned disbelief. Our friend Heather MacAskill had been killed the night before in a single-car crash on her way home for the holidays. My loss was minor compared to that of my friend Kathy Fisher, Heather’s very best friend.

Kathy looked like a wraith herself at that early morning requiem. By times she was silent and brooding, then wailing like a banshee. The death of another young person under tragic circumstances is very hard to process. It digs into young psyches with ferocity and can generate rage as much as sadness.

I didn’t experience many deaths after Heather. But I did lose my peers through my own stupidity. I was often the cause of the separation. Worse is that I wasn’t exactly sure what it was that I had done or said to drive me out of those people’s lives and affections. In other cases, I was profoundly aware of what triggered the loss. And I had to live with that. Being a drunken teenager with non-existent boundaries may have been all the reason that was needed.

So when a dear lost friend from childhood wandered back into my life yesterday, I was beyond joyous. It felt as if a piece of my heart had been restored in my chest. That she answered a tremulous overture with warmth and kindness filled me with the same. I was so afraid of approaching her again. I am very glad I did. Time does heal.

What I’ve learned about loss is that there are – as author Judith Viorst put it – Necessary Losses. Not only necessary but inevitable. We must shed the illusions of childhood to become adults. We may have to move and leave our comfort zone to pursue a new opportunity. We must let our children go to let them build their own lives. Our parents must leave for their well-deserved rest. That’s the deal.

Life is all about birth and death; rising and falling; coming and going; giving and taking. We are regularly reminded that it is life’s brevity that gives it meaning. When we leave this planet, as we inevitably must, there will be lots and lots of people out there to fill in the gap.

This is my time and it is precious. I didn’t always see it that way. What a sad and stupid little girl I was. I feel sorry for the me I once was and the hard lessons I had to learn to finally “get it.” To finally learn that it is life’s very uncertainties that make it so rich and unreplaceable. That was a lovely lesson I found along the way. Bring on the day.