Lost
Why do we say we have lost someone when they die or kill themselves? Where did we lose them? At the mall? In a maze? How did we lose them? Did we look away for a second? Are they hiding in some endless game of hide and seek? Why did we lose them? Did we not love them well? Did we neglect them and when we looked back, they were gone?
Here’s what really happened: I lost myself. When my brother hung himself, he died. And I lost the person I was going to be. And yes, I do understand the whole ‘every moment in your life, happy, sad, tragic, lunatic, makes up the sum of who you are’ argument.
No shit, sherlock.
This is how it actually goes down in the life of an average fourteen year old when a vital link is lost. You are cut adrift, tossed out of your own existence like so much garbage and left to pick up the flotsam of your once upon a happy life for the next forty years, give or take a few spent in blessed oblivion.
I think of the girl I was and of the monster inside who might have slept on, undisturbed for the rest of my life. Instead, the monster came out to play and life as we know it, ladies and gentlemen, was lost.
That girl might have grown into a good person. She might have felt deserving of love, instead of doubting it at every turn. She might have let go of toxic people, instead of clinging on, too frightened to leave them and their brand of damaged love behind.
She might have valued a good heart, instead of the heart that only knows how to hurt. She might have learnt to love and be loved. Instead of running from kindness, always towards pain.
That girl never lived. She was lost before she had a chance to be. In her place grew this other person. I learned to live with her, though she sometimes frightened me. Recently, I’ve even come to like her, at least the bits on public display. I think about the person my brother was, and whether he would have recognised the girl he left behind. I laugh as I think of him kicking my ass to hell and back for the mess I allowed my life to become.
I think of my brother as a lost boy – not because he is dead but because he was lost whilst he still lived. He really was the boy who never grew up. The story of Peter Pan leaves me with an uneasy feeling. Because it is eerie and true and the stuff of my nightmares. My lost boy. I never did rescue him. And in return, he left me lost as well.
This morning, the 50 year old woman who lives in my head felt a shiver run up her spine. My dead mother brushed against my shoulder as I took out the ingredients for her favourite morning cuppa – mint and lemongrass flavoured tea: strong, sweet and slightly bitter from the overbrewing. I had to stand still, and blink away some unexpected tears. It’s been a long time coming, this sense of loss that held me close in my kitchen.
The people who die are not lost. Depending on your perspective, they are found, returned, freed – and forever dead. The lost ones are still here, like zombies. The lost ones are those of us who cannot let go. Who are stuck in some twisted time warp.
I think of the tiny moment after death. The moment of truth for all believers, and unbelievers too. Do the dead look for their body, incredulous, unbelieving? Do they find that they are nothing at all, not soul, nor breath? Does their energy find its instantaneous way into the universe? Do their own dead, gone before, find them? Welcome them or claw them down? You see, the dead are not lost. Discovery of who they really are, who they have always been, lies in that moment.
In that split second, before the dead find themselves, they might look back. And see for the first time, the lost ones. Then the second is gone. All that is ahead is waiting to be found. Leave the lost ones behind. We will find our broken redemption. Or not. It is out of their hands now.
We grieve the loss of life. We hold funerals and pray for the souls of the departed. How long before it strikes us that we are actually grieving the loss of our own life, the life that was to have been? I’ve said it before: funerals are the easy bit. It’s what comes after that is truly frightening.
Those of us who are lost, we have a story to tell. If enough time lapses, the story becomes less about the absent person and more about our search to find ourselves again. Each story is different, each story is the same. It is hard to admit to the loss of self but harder still to search alone. Redemption lies in our shared stories and learning to love the lost ones – the faces we see each morning in the mirror. The dead, after all, are gone, found, forever.