The Mechanics of Loss

Sometimes it will feel as though you are on television. What with the candlelights, the house filled with flowers, and velvet curtains in the backdrop. You will glow. You will be radiant. You will look absolutely tragic, delicate, and beautiful. Everyone will feel sorry for you. Everyone will want to be you. Even you will want to be you. The weight loss will be amazing: sunken cheeks, hollow eyes, thin limbs. The effort at cheerfulness, the ironic retorts, the entertaining anecdotes will naturally be underlined with sadness, which you will try to hide, of course, but which they will see anyway. The sight of you will soften the hardest of hearts, will move even your enemies to tears.

At some point, however, you will start to want to feel some real pain. And it will come when there is no one to see it. Then you will be truly helpless and vulnerable. Be careful: there is much too many negative lay literature on dealing with loss out there. You will want to read them all, because you will understand and believe them all. Know what to ignore. Know what’s useful. It mostly has to do with culture, you know. Various cultures deal with it in varying ways. All of which will be wrong. All of which will be worth trying. The absence is permanent, after all. You have all the time in the world.

The truth is that it takes a while. It happens while you are walking back to your apartment, one windy January afternoon, when the sunlight is so soft, it falls in various colors and in many wonderful ways, on pavements, on footbridges, on roofs of cars. The fall and spread of light is almost like a choreographed Christmas dance, or like music made visual, making the city streets kinder, the buildings and people’s houses friendlier, the strangers’ faces not so strange at all. But you know that none of this is real anyway, so you walk on. It can happen when you arrive in your empty, quiet, clean apartment, and you open the glass door that leads to a sparse garden outside, to let last night’s smell of cigarette smoke out, but the sound of a choir of birds will so surprise you, and make you forget you are in the middle of a dense, dirty city, so far from home and everyone you love. You will forget that it is only three in the afternoon, the middle of workweek; all of this will make you want to fix yourself up a tall glass of rum and soda, play some old Sunday music. You know there is something artificial about all of this natural light, this natural beauty, and then that’s when it’s going to start, but you will heave it off very deeply, and insist on putting your feet up and staring lovingly at the trees anyway. It also happens while you are having breakfast with your favorite cousin and you are laughing over old family jokes, and there is a very brief pause, the sound of your forks lightly scratching the plates will be so magnified, drinking up the glass of water will only choke you, dear. It is very possible that even while you’re in a strange country, pondering foreign faces, none of which possesses a single familiar trait, a smile, a sigh, a flip of the hair by the well-dressed, middle-aged woman across from you on the train will do it. While in a conference, the smell of the artificially cooled air will be so familiar, harmless, impersonal, but also very distinct it will finally bring tears to your eyes.

Of course, it will often be shameful, because random. Then you will know that this is what it truly means. It really is just control that you lose. Your memory is on the loose, your body is not yours, your mind has splintered into so many sectors, a different voice has taken up residence in each. This is when you sometimes really lose it. And this is also when, sometimes, you will be grateful for losing it, because it will be easier. You understand now how some people cannot go back to how they were. And, perhaps, this is the real loss: no longer having that right, that capacity, or that grace to go back. And forth. Being denied that instinctive mental movement which we used to take for granted.

Understand that this is the mechanics of loss, and it also explains in part the mechanics that bind: children to their parents, and parents to their children, in this enormous circle of pain that underlines love and life, and giving, and taking; of birth, and death, and growing, and necessarily feeling.

There’s nothing else to do but stand and excuse yourself. Personal necessity, you can always say. Walk straight to the washroom then, and do it. Do it wholeheartedly, do it soundlessly. In the stark, cold, windowless space of this white, tiled room, in the middle of nowhere.

There will be many, many more such rooms. And, the truth is, it will take a while to understand it, to lose it, to live with it.