Loss

Loss. You have something important to you taken away. Your team doesn't score the winning run or goal or point. You misplace something and cannot find it, which happened quite frequently in my home as I was growing up. Not a week went by when my mother, brother and sister and I weren't caught up in a frantic search for my father's glasses or his keys.

I've lost touch with friends over the years. More to the point, I lost some of the things that we had in common. I (or they) moved away and we started new lives in new places.

Loss has different degrees of severity. Some losses are easy to recover from. Your sense of self remains more intact after a loss of lesser value than after a loss of greater value. And, the value most definitely doesn't have to be monetary. The emotional or intrinsic value of someone or something can be priceless.

The loss of my dad has so far been the hardest loss of my life.

I can remember the last time I saw him. I was home visiting for the holidays from Mississippi. At the time I was only visiting my family for holidays and family events like weddings, and sadly, funerals. It was a cold January day just after New Year's, and he and my mother had taken me to the airport. With all of the security lines and barriers in place my parents stood off to the side as I walked through the security screening to my gate. I glanced back and waved at my parents through the plexi-glass. That was the last time I saw my dad.

We talked on the phone three to four times a week when I was in Mississippi. We spoke for the last time a day before he died. I remember the conversation. It was textbook foreshadowing. "You know," he said, "The medicine I'm taking...This book says it can be fatal."

My father had invested in a large pharmaceutical dictionary a few years earlier when he was first diagnosed with a heart problem. He had a pacemaker and took a cocktail of drugs, including the fatal one.

There was no clear reason for his death, or my loss. There were many unanswered questions, but in my mind there was one clear answer to all of them: I had lost my dad. Whether he was slowly killed by heart medication, or hit by a car, the outcome was the same. He was dead and he was my loss.

Loss is one of the deepest feelings I have ever experienced. As I am writing this I can feel the loss well up inside of me. It rises from somewhere deep in my belly, over my heart and chest, and erupts with tears in my eyes.

I usually end an essay with a resolution of some sort that would tie the story together and leave a feeling of completion. That's not as easy to do this time. I believe that loss and the feelings of grief and sadness that can accompany loss do not go away. Loss has changed me and I live with it every day. Some days the feelings erupt, and most days they don't. Either way, I live with the loss. I guess in some ways it is one of the connections that I still have with my dad. The notion of his loss and missing him assure me that he is still here.