OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Loss

September 19th, 2007

Today it was my son’s portable video game case with a bunch of cartridges in it that left home in Portland and didn’t make it to Albuquerque; Saturday it was a stuffed dragon of his younger brother’s that I had endowed with enough anthropomorphized sentiment because it — named Turnip, by my three year old, Turnip, he’s got a gift for names! had accompanied Rainer to preschool on that first insecure day, had been kissed goodnight — had endowed it with enough something that the idea of just buying a replacement felt guiltily wrong. Turnip set out for errands with us, and was unfindable at bed time, and several phone calls did not reveal it to have been turned in anywhere.

Other stupid losses — the couch last week decided it had been jumped upon one time too many and gave up the ghost, the frame collapsed, defeated, so we have no place to sit in the living room and I spent yesterday — instead of packing for our trip today, obsessing over how our living room doesn’t work, and is too cluttered to be comfortable, a tiny room designed only for sitting, no piano, not the library I have taken as some concrete manifestation of my identity and moved faithfully from one home to another over the last twelve years, certainly not for a television. And with terrible reluctance I toted books and bookcases down to the basement where I can still easily access a book I want, but maybe there will be a little more room to sit in the living room. But it feels wrong, like I am doing it so we can have room to watch television, which just seems shallow and lame. And we are still in negotiations about how to replace that couch. Small house, big family, what I really want is a place where we can all be together, not the kids off in their own rooms, all of us withdrawing, because I fear the day when they really don’t want us all to be together, it seems like this dreadful looming inevitability.

But I know it’s not about the couch. I get all fixated on arranging and cleaning the house when other things are out of control, because — well I just do. The universe isn’t that big and bad and scary if my cd’s are in alphabetical order with genres that only I can really define.

And I must admit I go out to check under the seats in the rental van and find myself, ack, reciting:

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I’ve been dreading coming to New Mexico, because even though my grandmother died in June, so long as I wasn’t here I could continue without it being truly real, she wasn’t a part of my daily life, I didn’t get the daily reminders of grief, the rending of the fabric of the everyday. But, now that I am here, and seeing her empty house, seeing cousins who belonged to my childhood, allowing for the overlapping of griefs — that the person she was to me was just slightly different than the person she was to my sister, to this cousin or to that one, and the collection of all of us coming together with our memories and our stories of who she was makes her absence this more concrete thing — I’ve been worried about it being overwhelming. Worried about responding appropriately. Worried about what I will feel, and about what I might not feel.

She would have been one hundred tomorrow. We had a birthday dinner for her tonight, but it was hard to imagine how it would have been — she would not have liked being the center of such attention, of so much fuss. She had a way of not quite pursing her lips, blinking behind her glasses, nodding her head, patting your hand, that seemed to acknowledge your need to connect but still gently deflect the attention. I look at the collection of people here to celebrate her life, and wonder if we form a crude outline of the things she believed in, faith in various forms, the commitment to musical education, the books always at hand, the working hard and not feeling sorry for yourself…

The funny thing is that my response to all of the conventional expressions of condolences have been “Well, it’s sad missing her, but she had such a long, such a wonderful life, and even her death seemed to be happening at a time of her choosing, waiting until my parents were done with their school year, and it was gentle and peaceful. And this period of decline wasn’t frightening like I thought it might be, it was this grace of someone whose spent her whole life taking care of others allowing herself to be taken care of…”

The moment of loss isn’t what makes me crazy, the tug and the tooth not there in just a moment, it’s the adjustment, the tongue unable to stop tracing the new contours of the mouth, the new dawning of each implication of the loss. If everybody here tomorrow to memorialize my grandmother is bringing with them a tiny piece of who she was to them and we’re all together and then we disperse and then this person my grandmother was really becomes past tense, and it’s awful.

But maybe with some bawling and hugging and going ahead and really feeling it, I’ll be able to go on and deal with the things my kids keep inadvertently leaving behind and forgetting, the things I cannot control, stop looking at furniture catalogues like porn, and be ok with loss since there is no way to prevent it.

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