Losing

I lost the matching sock, the single earring, the writing contest, my beloved Rapidograph drafting pen. I lost track of my best childhood friend, Carmen, the girl who could sew anything and always wore the pair of loafers I coveted. I lost the eighth grade “Spelldown” contest on TV: after spelling 99 words correctly, “tarantula” was my downfall.

I lost the ninth-grade cheerleader election, I lost arguments, I lost boyfriends. I lost my nerve atop the high dive. I lost my first dog, who ran away, and every dog I loved after that, save one. Someday I will lose him, too.

I lost my bearings, lost my perspective. I lost opportunities by silencing myself, too fearful to speak up on my own behalf, too afraid of not belonging. I shed my strong Southern accent while spending my sixteenth summer at a Montana social justice camp filled with New Yorkers.

I lost my way in college, mislaid my ambition, squandered three years in the high desert of New Mexico, sacrificed my self-respect to a man, underestimated myself while trying to learn everything my parents had neglected to teach me, raising myself into adulthood. I left behind a nearly completed degree in elementary education to pursue psychology. I lost my first dissertation advisor to narcissism (his), surviving to earn a PhD and a career I love.

Becoming a mother, I lost sleep worrying about my sons. I lost my mind to postpartum depression after the birth of my second child, Sam. Night came on and stayed for months, while I lived underwater in the darkness, unable to surface. When Sam was 8, I lost him on a wooded bike trail when he rode ahead and took an unexpected turn. Ten minutes of heart pounding terror until he appeared again.

I lost track of time as my sons grew like saplings, spread their branches, became a mighty oak and an elegant willow. I lost my own rootlessness, the sharp edges of judgement, the emptiness inside. I surrendered my shyness, freed my voice, reclaimed writing, found community.

I lost my rare, valuable Star Wars Lego figures to a fatherless child with cystic fibrosis. Our therapy session ending, he stuffed Yoda and Darth Vader into his pocket, insisting he’d brought them from home.  His mother arrived, I challenged his ownership, tears ran down his cheeks as he stared silently into the distance. I got lost in the power of his longing. What did I know then of foreshortened futures?

I awoke in menopause, surveyed my losses: working memory, perfect eyesight, hearing, hair, joint mobility, muscle mass, gray matter, billions of skin cells, an inch of height I couldn’t spare – all gone like sand being sucked from beneath my feet by ocean tides.

I lost the beautiful boy who made me a mother, when he was only 23. Along with Benjamin, I lost my hope, my life’s meaning, our expected future. I forfeited my innocence about life and death, and enrolled in the school of impermanence. Waves of subsequent loss broke over me: a brother, a mother, a father, two child patients, another dog.

I lost my fingertip in an encounter with a knife and an onion.

I just lost the old man on the corner, the one I waved to for nearly 10 years, passing his house while taking my dogs on long walks, a practice for soothing my grief over Benjamin. A bald man who listened to Benny Goodman outside on warm days and lived alone in his pink rambler. I watched the gradual erasure of his long presence on this corner: first his homemade sign (“My Hermitage”) disappeared from above the garage, then the dilapidated office chair where he gazed out from his porch. When the blazing red “For Sale” sign appeared, it was plain that I’d lost my hope of talking with him one day. Despite political yard signs I disagreed with, I’d always thought I’d walk up his driveway and say hello. Where do they go, these actions we mean to take, our imagined futures, our best intentions? What becomes of our undeclared attachments?

Befriending death, embracing grief, my emotional armor peeled away. The fear lurking underneath all my life dissipated; I had no more patience for human cruelty, smallness, or the trivia of this world. I’d survived the loss I dreaded most. No one will mess with me again. Apprenticed with the darkness, I dismissed grudges, watched old wounds soften, surrendered self-judgment, uncovered deep gratitude. I fed my soul.

Lucinda Cummings is a writer and retired child psychologist who lives in Minneapolis with her husband and a rescue dog named after a famous jazz musician. She began publishing her work after turning 50. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in the Baltimore Review, Hippocampus, Woven Tale Press, Glassworks, and other journals. Her website can be found at lucindathewriter.com.