Lost

One of the burdens of growing older is losing things. You name it, I’ve lost it. And I’m not pleasant about it. I’m annoyed. My passport is gone. I had it on my desk, and now it’s gone. I’d like to blame the gods, or my husband, but that doesn’t work.

I don’t want advice about my anxiety over lost things. I don’t want you to tell me it’s not important, or it will turn up. I don’t want your wisdom. I want my passport. When something is missing, I feel incomplete, off-center.

If everything is in its place, the world is going to keep turning on its axis and I will sleep well, content that life is orderly and I belong here. Till I find what is lost I lose that certainty, the safe ground. I feel like I’ll never find happiness, never enjoy a good day, or be pleasant to live with.

I’m one who knows where everything is because I make sure everything is in its place. Ask me where you can find a pair of scissors; how about a wool scarf? A cookie sheet? When I know where everything is, there is a completeness to things. I’m not a philosopher who agonizes over a faulty theory, I’m a grandmother who needs things to be where they belong.

For the wise seeker, a lamp illuminating the darkness is a help to manage a troubling search. A lamp brings hope; it represents a way forward. The clarity it brings softens our anxiety and brightens our outlook. We need not be afraid in the dark if we have a lamp to lead us. If we light a lamp of calm, of composure, of humor, we find lost things. Some people think of the Bible as their lamp. Some are devoted to a loved one who banishes darkness. My lamp is a friend who finds things. She isn’t here today, so my passport is still gone.

I’m told that suffering a serious loss moves us toward compassion. If we know what it is to lose a partner, a pet, a knee, a home, or love, we earn a wisdom that makes us more understanding of the pain of others. Though we suffer, mourning is a process that develops our souls from innocent to maturity. It’s as if we go through the painful wilderness before we can find the meadow, the opening, and we emerge more able to sense the hidden needs of people around us. A nice thought. I’m not sure I believe it.

Annie Dillard, my favorite philosopher, wrte of the rent we pay by being alive, and that rent is the losses we suffer. I like that metaphor. She writes:

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. . . her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here — the extraordinary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.

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It seems cruel to have to learn to cope with the loss of strength, the loss of people and so many of the props that make life bearable. We shed those parts of our lives and lose them with grief. Yet, Dillard says, we are more wise for having gone through mourning and loss. I’m reminded of a woman I knew who mourned the loss of her cat deeply, but she was not so difficult to console as another who refused to admit that the loss of her pet bothered her. That person got cranky and angry at life. It seems we must pay that “extraordinary rent” of mourning to grow compassionate.

Our memories of loss will send us into sorrows, but a sharp memory can lift us out of self-pity too. If you’re a poet, like Dylan Thomas, you can transform your sad memory into words like this:

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And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means

And green and golden I was . . ..

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My passport has not emerged from its hiding place, and I have to admit that I don’t travel anymore, don’t need a passport, and must give in to a new reality, that I’m aging out of the passport community and live now in a quieter, more settled, place, where I read about the South Seas of Robert Louis Stevenson and the American South of Toni Morrison. Those visits have their beauty. They are quieter and less encumbered by the necessity of remembering to take a passport.