thoughts, words, deeds

I am loss

Motivational Monday! Actor/Comedian Martin Short , born on this day in 1950, once said "I think loss can fuel how you lead your whole life." Is this true? In what way or ways has loss affected your writing?

Absolutely I think it’s true. Our first instinctive responses that we had as babies, crying at the chill of the air and the pain of birth are also about the loss of the womb and the comfort of being surrounded by mother. One of the first things we teach to babies is the concept of peek-a-boo—I know, it’s a game, but still, it’s an important concept: just because you can’t see me right now doesn’t mean I’m gone forever. That is a concept that is connected to loss—something that babies instinctively fear. We rock babies to sleep at night, and when we do, we’re making them a promise. You can fall to sleep. I will protect you. I will keep watch. You don’t have to watch to make sure you don’t lose during the night.

Of course, that’s taking loss to be something very big—any time something changes, there is an element of loss. Probably gain as well, but we tend to focus on the loss. I have lived all over the United States over the course of my life. Every time I moved, I lost my old environment and gained a new one. I lost old friends and acquaintances (some of whom I’ve never found again—we moved when I was six months old, when I was three, when I was five, when I was eight, thirteen, fourteen, eighteen, twenty-two, thirty-two, and that doesn’t count student housing and the various flats when I was in England for eighteen months—it’s easier to keep friendships when you’re old enough to remember a friend’s last name). I’ve always cared more about the loss of the people than the loss of the place. No place really has a root inside me.

I’ve lost health. I’ve lost people to death—grandparents. A nephew. Friends. One of my parents’ best friends died of cancer. I lost a high school history teacher when I was a freshman in college. A friend lost a son to a freak accident when a rowing machine fell on him in the basement. He was seven years old. He was one of my youngest sister’s best friends. We never told her because we’d moved about six months before.

I’ve lost little things. The name of a book that I liked. The smell of my first grade classroom. The face of my best friend in kindergarten whose name was Tara and who didn’t go into first grade with me. In preschool, I remember disliking the apples because they were washed and the place where the core was filled with water and the water tasted funny, but I don’t remember the taste or why it was funny. Part of living is letting memories wash out so that new ones can enter.

I am my dead. I am the sum of my memories, however subtracted and divided they are. And so, of course it affects my writing. I have a difficult time with setting because place is an alien concept to me. This means I’ve worked on making it more real in my stories. I write blood and death into my writing. I write dead children and pain. I write random losses and great losses and random gains and greater gains because I try to write life.

And life is a complicated series of losses. That we (all people, not just the storytellers) turn into pattern and tell as story.