The Art of Letting Go

For The American Scholar, Lisa Russ Spaar offers us beautiful litany of loss in all its various shapes and forms. From those we love to objects like keys, from our teeth to our moral compass, Spaar takes a close look at what we go through when we experience loss at various times in our lives, and how losses tend to stack up as we age.

I’ve informally polled several friends, colleagues, and family members about their first remembered losses. For most, it was when a milk tooth fell out, usually around the age of six. (Surely there are primal reasons many of us dream throughout our lifetimes about our teeth, as important as they are to speaking, eating.) More than 20 years ago, one of my talented undergraduates, Molly, wrote a poem about losing her first tooth while sledding in winter. Upon tonguing the little bloody socket that remained, she wrote, “I taste my death.” That line has haunted me over the decades. Again, our bodies: made for loss. Language: our ability to articulate what that might mean.

I often wonder what was happening in my late mother’s mind as she sank, over a period of 10-plus years, into the tangled ambages of dementia. She lost the names of things and people. She lost any memory of who we were, those of us who cared for her, even her devoted husband, my father. She finally even forgot that she was not only an alcoholic with a fifth of Scotch hidden in the breadbox but also a chain smoker, though she’d occasionally hold a drinking straw to her lips and take a long, deep drag.