The Horror of Loss

It's a long weekend, so timing is strange, and nothing is happening as normal. Not feeling well, I took a two hour nap today on the chaise, and just now I finally recommitted to cleaning the house.

I dropped my father's old transistor radio. Circa probably sometime in the 1940s, this was a mahogany colored bakelite little breadbox, and had still worked even as recently as when we were kids. It was fully intact, still had all components and tubes, and would even buzz quietly if actually plugged in and turned on. And I have shattered its case.

My instant response to this was to fall to the floor in shards myself, loud sobs, terrible tears.

I know that the loss of a thing attached to a man is fearful only because it is one less piece of HIM. Because it reminds us that as time passes, there will be less and less. It's not about the object; the object is a symbol.

My brother trades in symbols like that, saving what has been hidden, and calling it artifact.

My mom is able to ascribe symbolism to approximate objects - not the "real" thing from her childhood, she can still attach the immortality imbued in artifacts into new artifacts like the ones actually attached to memory.

I live surrounded by artifacts. The beautiful tables TEO has let me hold onto, which stood silent at the center of warm afternoons at her father's. The chair my sister-in-law upholstered, in which I sit typing right now. The television X left with me, and the DVD player he gave me the day my father died. The paintings of my grandmother, the globe, always beside this radio, which my dad had as a kid. There are pieces of my grandparents', parents', siblings', even my nieces' lives all over this cheering, welcoming house. They MAKE it cheering and welcoming. They make it feel "warm" to me in that ineffable way beside the point of temperature.

My very father's cremains, in his little dragon box.



This is why I could never in good faith (har de har) be a Buddhist. I'm a believer in the cult of Stuff.

Breaking my father's radio means there is one less (intact) thing of his in the world.

Maybe my brother's old advice - to bury some piece of it in one place, other pieces of it far away, in some archaeologically-impossible configuration - is the next response.

Now is not the time to contemplate disposal.

Now is the time to still the wracking horror, to sit in this good chair, to be glad of those things which do survive, to survey my blessings, to nullify my self-blame for something which isn't even a crime.

Now is the time to clean this house.

Now is the time to be glad of the father I had ... *have* ... who was so fine a man that the very loss of his childhood radio is occasion for such anguish. Tears and flapdoodle.


***


The anniversary is coming, and I'm surviving a lush case. What once was a radio had become just a piece of silent decor. I know better than that this is genuinely loss.

But I know enough, too, to experience this sadness, to know it for what it is. And to be so grateful I have so much to lose. How blessed my dad made me.

How like a little kid in the way I miss him.