Mysterious Losses

Have you ever lost something and are still baffled by its disappearance? 30 years ago, I graduated from college and my three sisters gave me a Mont Blanc pen.  It was beautiful and expensive.  It meant the world to me.  Several years later, it disappeared.  I never took it out of the house and its loss is a mystery.  Did it somehow get stuck in papers that went in the trash? Did someone take it, accidentally or on purpose? I searched and searched my condo and hoped that it would turn up one day.  Seven years later, I sold my condo and moved out.  The pen never turned up.  To this day, that pen means a lot to me. Maybe it means more because I lost it.

Recently we remodeled our garage and went through every box, bin, bag and cabinet shelf.  Sorting through my stuff, I realized that none of my old writings, stories, essays were in any of the boxes or bins.  The pages I remember keeping are all gone.  I did find lots of notebooks and folders filled with notes from numerous high school and college classes.  I am bewildered by this, did the boxes get mixed up and the wrong ones tossed out.  I will never know and am currently in the process of accepting that I have no control over this, what’s done is done, I can’t change it.  I am disappointed but the fact that I never searched for them sooner means that I can easily live without them.  I know people who have lost everything to fires, floods and other disasters, they had no control over the timing of their loss. I am grateful, just a little sad.

The loss that hit me the hardest was in reading old cards and letters from my late friend, Jayne.  She passed away much too early at age 49 and I miss her dearly.  The mystery for me is her artistic talents and humor, where did they go when her addiction took over?  Holding things that she gave me and reading the funny words that she wrote to me broke my heart open even more. She often mixed up metaphors and cliches, I wish I could remember more clearly which ones as they were hilarious.

Maybe these losses give us more appreciation, help us make wiser decisions on what to keep and what to release in our lives, and give us the opportunity to reminisce about those we will never stop loving.