The Things We Lose

On becoming unattached

I was always losing everything as a kid. I’d be running around the house with one shoe, morning carpool honking outside, my mom yelling after me, “Who loses just one shoe?!”

I did, often.

Now my fourteen-year-old son does the exact same thing. I don’t ask him who loses only one shoe, though, because I now know, it’s obviously genetic. He’s running around looking for his missing shoe, and I feel both kinship and frustration.

“Don’t worry,” I say, as his school bus chugs past our kitchen window. “I’ll drive you in.”

On the way, we listen to Kendrick, which makes us feel like people who always have both shoes on, ready for anything.

I tell him how mad his Nana, my mom, used to get when I’d lose something. We were broke, and I can see now how scared she was all the time, how costly it was to lose anything. But for him, these stories are about me being in trouble, which are his favorite kind.

“Would she get really mad?” he asks me.

“So mad,” I say.

He smiles at the thought.

My mom kept polaroids in every drawer in her house showing what belonged in that drawer. I’ve never met a person more meticulous with their things.

She married six times, one of those husbands finally pulling her out of lifelong dire financial straits. In her late forties, she went from crying at the dinner table over endless money troubles to never having to work again. Still, all of her marriages ended badly, and she never shook the feeling that the bottom might suddenly drop out at any moment. “We could lose everything,” she’d say.

That’s always true, of course, but she lived in constant terror of this, rather than just being aware of the possibility as a background hum. Growing up with her, I absorbed this fear, but I had the opposite takeaway. Why care about things, if it’s all so fleeting and unreliable?

Now, when my own son loses things, I appreciate his non-attachment in theory, but when it’s his Nike jacket or his expensive soccer cleats, I’d prefer a little more attachment.

“Where’s your jacket?” I ask him.

“Well, I saw it in the lost and found before recess,” he tells me, “but when I came back later it was gone.”

“Why didn’t you just take it when you saw it?”

“Because I was on my way out for recess,” he says, as if I’ve asked something dumb.

When my mom was in memory care, even after she’d forgotten my name, she asked me once, “Where is my private property?” I’d surrounded her with as many of her favorite things as I could. Her room was lovely and light-filled. There were photos and books, her favorite cherry red cashmere scarf. But she meant all of her things. The bulwark she’d built against loss.

We’d just spent a small fortune moving all of her possessions, an entire household, cross-country. I moved her into a sweet little condo just a mile away from us, overlooking a pond. It was here that I witnessed the spiraling disarray, things left everywhere, plates of half-eaten pancakes put back into the cupboard. It became obvious very quickly that she couldn’t live alone. She lasted only a week in this condo.

This lifetime of things she’d collected, winnowed down to a condo-full, would have to be slimmed down much further, to what we could fit into a 370-square-foot memory care unit. We gave away almost everything. My daughter wanted only a silver ladybug brooch and a wild-patterned 1970’s silk scarf. I knew someone in an undocumented community who brought a few friends in pickup trucks to haul away furniture, plates, kitchen gear. We didn’t have the space or need for any of it.

I felt, with both of my parents’ deaths, a strong compulsion not to take any of their things. It was a sort of self-imposed, aspirational non-attachment—not just to the things, but to them, too. Maybe I felt it would help me miss them less. I have, of course, regretted this on occasion.

I do have a few mementos: a photo my dad kept of me sitting on his lap under a Sycamore tree, both of us grinning madly. A little watercolor that my mom loved. More than reminding me of my parents, though, these things often simply remind me that I’ve lost them.

I call my sister, reeling with the idea of this loss. Confused by it.

“Can you actually believe it,” I ask her, “that they’re just gone?”

I can’t get my head around it. It doesn’t feel possible. In that way that you might lose some precious little bauble, and think, it was just right here. How can it be gone, when I can still imagine it so clearly?

I remember a time playing in a vacant lot down the road from my mom’s house, after a heavy rain. I had new Nikes on, but couldn’t resist playing in the mud. If I moved quickly enough, I found I could scamper across a little mud pond that had formed, scurrying across the surface before my feet sank. It was the most thrilling game–until I got snagged halfway, suddenly knee-deep in thick, sodden muck, unable to move.

This must be quicksand, I thought, having read something about this deadly stuff. I panicked, and pulled hard, my socked foot leaving one of the Nikes behind with a sklorp sound. I managed to reach solid ground, and turned to look just as the mud closed in and filled the leg hole, entombing my shoe. I never saw it again.

I ran back home in my single Nike and a muddy sock, the rain starting up again, pelting me. Our front door was locked, so I banged on it, urgently. My mom opened the door and looked down, noting this one-shoe situation.

“I know this looks bad,” I told her breathlessly, “but it’s good news.”

“It sure doesn’t look like good news,” she said.

“It is,” I told her. “There was quicksand, and I almost got pulled under.”

“Quicksand,” she said, with barely concealed amusement. “So tell me the good news.”

“I’m right here,” I said. “I made it back to you.”