Everything you lose makes room for something new.
The flimsy postcard, bought at least twenty years ago and faded from its original pink, is taped to the edge of a metal bookshelf in my office. The simple hand-drawn image depicts a Victorian woman whose old-fashioned bonnet is being lifted off her head by the wind; it is about to fly away and she's trying to keep a grasp on the ribbons.
I suppose the caption could easily have read "hold onto your hat" and that line would have resonated with someone else the way "Everything you lose makes room for something new" trumpeted its message to me.
But out of everything I have ever lost, I have kept hold of that card. The message is too important and my memory is too short for me to have allowed it out of my sight for very long. I look at the postcard a lot. So maybe it isn't about memory after all.
Maybe, if I'm being honest, it's about faith or understanding or hope.
Maybe it's about knowing that while loss is inevitable, you still have to trust that life does not empty itself like a cracked cup but instead renews itself like a well.
I've lost a few things of value. About ten years ago I must have dropped a pair of good gold earrings as I was leaving the Amtrak station in Hartford. I'd taken them off on the way back from New York and put them in a pocket--a mistake--and despite calls made the next morning to every number I could find, the earrings remained gone. Lost.
If I couldn't have them, then I could only hope they went to a good home, found by somebody who really needed a gift thrown down apparently by fate or fortune. I more or less reconciled myself to the absence of those baubles even though my own carelessness in the matter still bothers me. Who wouldn't miss gold that's gone? But then again I have lots of earrings and can only wear one pair at a time.
I've had bigger losses.
As painful as it is to admit, I have retrieved and kept things thrown down by fate or fortune. I've pocketed them with a shrug of the shoulder and the belief that I was only doing what the next person would do.
About thirty years ago I found a beautiful pen on the floor of a dressing room in a huge department store. I kept it. For a while, I even wrote with it.
But I never did find the right kind of replacement cartridge. I still have the pen but I can't use it. It remains on my desk as a polished, pretty, silent rebuke to the fact that I should have behaved better. Even if I never knew to whom the pen belonged, I‘ve always known that it belonged to somebody else.
Another found object bothers me more. I kept a single earring I found one evening outside a church--how low is that? I should have contacted the parish the next day and offered to return it if anyone called to track it down. It was the least I could have done and I didn't do it. I worry that my spiritual permanent record is blotted by that mistake.That single earring turned into my loss. I forfeited a piece of the better part of myself.
And of course these are all little losses.
To lose a thing, or even to experience a painful emotion or moment of awareness, is nothing compared to losing a person you love to distance, or anger, or death, or any of the other abysses over which even the strongest and most devoted of us cannot make a bridge.
Yet even monumental losses, unrelenting losses, make room in us.
We lose a lover or mate and discover in ourselves a storehouse of independence. We no longer have a certain friend in our life but we form an alliance with someone we might otherwise never have known. We lose a parent only to find, paradoxically, a renewed sense of their influence and tenderness in our lives.
What can you do to what is gone-- except to let it go? Perhaps the only thing is to remember that if life is about loss, it is also about discovery.
A postcard can sometimes help. And even if you lose it, you'll probably remember the words.
