What Loss is Like

Regret grows out of the awareness that you have let things pass by without seeing them; but loss is not lessened by full appreciation of what you had while you had it. Loss is aggravated by that. Regret is abstract. It involves a forecasting of what might have been and a pain over it. I knew the pain of regret. But then comes loss. In loss you feel the absence of a real thing. Loss is the creation of a hole, of an emptiness. The more central and irreplaceable the lost thing is, the harder the loss is to endure. I didn’t think I would be able to make it through even the first day, even as my minutes were filled with other matters. The weight of it. It was incapacitating and enveloping.

Oh driving is hard, so hard. I arrive breathing heavily through my mouth. All my composure lost. The worse part about being separated from someone you love is not knowing where they are, not knowing what they face, not knowing if they can cope, not knowing that . . . not knowing. This is the worst. No, the worst is knowing that how complete their pain is. Oh who can say what he worse of it is? This can’t be tamped down, it can’t be closed off, it can’t be put up in a box in the furthest recesses . . . it cannot be locked away.

I can’t imagine not crying every morning. I can’t imagine how I could not cry. I can’t . . . see . . . . And yet as I lay in the bed in those moments before sleep fully descends a picture comes to me. It is a flower, small and blue. Plucked and placed along some way I travel every day. It is where flowers do not grow, yet it is there, loose. It is somewhere that I might or might not look. It is so routine that I pass this way; that I would see this flower this day, I realize is so unlikely, and yet I also realize what the flower is. I realize that it has been placed there, in a hope that I would come across it. It has been placed there in a hope that of all the unlikely things, the one that would happen today is this very event. That I would see it. That I would not only see it but I would recognize it. I would know that this was designed. This was intentional. That it had been left here for me. I might wonder if there are a thousand other little things that I have not seen that have been placed here for me . . . for me.

And I realize the next morning, what that flower I saw was. And that I had seen it before. It was the twin of a flower from many years ago that was placed inside of an envelope, with a letter that made no reference to it. I flower so small that it nearly fell away unnoticed. It could easily have fluttered to the ground when the envelope was opened and the letter was removed. And been gone. But instead that act of love resounded over time. Until it was a garden. A forest.

And now a little flower.

And then a wave sweeps over and I wish for just a corner of the universe, be it ever so small, where we can meet again. Then another wave and I lose all further description. When loss comes upon us, it silences us. We gape instead of talking. It is more basic than words. It snuffs out our ability to be who we are.