Tag Archives: loss

Lost in Loss

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Watching my former city get decimated by unabating, indiscriminate flames as I sat in relative safety over 2,500 miles away summoned a kind of disconnected helplessness I hadn’t felt in a long time. 

The warning whistles were deafening. We all knew and accepted that we hadn’t moved to the most stable place on the planet. But even during my last few years in LA, I was shaken to see such a radical increase in wildfire activity, air quality warnings, and a general sense that the precarious balance of life in a desert masquerading as a metropolis was inching toward unsustainable…or, at the very least, unwise.

However, I never dreamed that this degree of destruction was conceivable, let alone possible. It was a perfect storm of bone-dry vegetation, those brutal Santa Ana winds, and multiple, concurrent blazes straining an already-stretched and exhausted collection of firefighters and first responders who didn’t sleep or stop for days. 

The results have been catastrophic. Lives and memories snuffed out in a matter of hours. Homes built on the backs of decades of tireless work and savings reduced to unrecognizable rubble and ash. People fleeing in a panic, grabbing the three or four items that registered as “irreplaceable” in the mere minutes they had to make those decisions.

I can’t comprehend the level of utter hysteria and helplessness they had to endure.

Where do you start when everything is gone? What’s the first step toward some semblance of normalcy when nothing but roadblocks and barricades are littering the path? It’s an unimaginable, Herculean climb back to ordinary. 

The “thoughts and prayers” will be sent. Donations will come flooding into the organizations doing their best to stop the bleeding. Unscrupulous real estate sharks will steal the scorched land for pennies on the dollar. The houses will be rebuilt. The neighborhoods will return.

Everything will burn again.

This is not simply another wildfire affecting the region in a history of wildfires. It was Mother Gaia’s siren song. Stop this behavior and your blatant disregard for the perilous disruption of Earth’s delicate harmony or you will continue to suffer under the weight of her wrathful hand.

My heart breaks for the city. The friends, colleagues, and people I met along the way are understandably scared and gutted right now. But there has to be a line drawn at some point. As the climate continues to rage, some incredibly tough decisions need to be made.

Rebuilding the same kinds of houses in the exact same place and simply hoping it might be better next time should not be one of them.

Adolescence Interrupted

Life and Loss

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A terrifying concept of personal psychological hell states, “On your last day on Earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.”  —Anonymous

This could be read as a simple warning to keep carpe diem on the top of the list, or a friendly injunction not to squander talents or time.

But in this moment of global uncertainty and personal panic, perhaps the message is much simpler at its base. The clock on the wall that seemed to run on solar power is really just a parasitic imposter, suckling at the teat of a couple of old Duracells.

The days, weeks, and months are disappearing at an alarmingly unsettling rate. We are relinquishing the reins precisely when the horse needs our help to find his footing. But this is not a roller coaster that ends when our eyes finally open, and there is no waiting on the sidelines until things return to “normal.”

People are going to continue to die, and we need to prepare for the weight of that loss. There is an emotional heft in the acknowledgment that so much could have been prevented and so many lives could have been saved.

We are a selfish, shortsighted, and dangerously myopic society. Unwilling to sacrifice our petty personal “freedoms” for the greater good of our most vulnerable citizens will ceaselessly drive these infection rates and further delay any notion of achieving even a remotely flattened curve.

We’ll keep striding into crowded restaurants and bars without masks, and pretend this is all some overblown hoax designed by imaginary foreign foes (or local liberals) to keep us incarcerated in some oppressive fairytale prison of our own creation.

Wake up. Mask up. Shut up.

You’re ridiculous and ignorant to believe your life has any more value than another’s. Putting your foot down in refusal is merely flattening the gravesite soil.

Adolescence Interrupted

Lost Ones

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“Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That’s the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what’s left, that’s the part you have to make up as you go.”  -Katharine Weber

The impossible unpredictability of our daily existence is enough to rattle the most grounded of souls. Add to that the utter lack of control we wield over the trajectory of our loved ones, and we become nothing more than walking/talking test tubes trapped in a centrifuge, forced to endure a dizzying dance of expectations, invocations, and crossed fingers.

Yet we are told that hardship and grief define character, that we must embrace the dark days to appreciate the sunrises. Nothing worth its salt is easily procured. A silver lining sits on the back of every storm cloud.

But I don’t think I’m capable of swallowing the force-fed doses of wishful thinking.

There is a chasm left when people leave and a heaping helping of affirmative visualization or positive manifestation can’t change the fact that we are all sprinting on hamster wheels built with a finite number of rotations.

My mother and I both lost a parent when we were 25. We recently talked about this odd shared life experience, and I realized that the finality of some moments never fully vacate the consciousness. Her loss was far more devastating than mine, but seeing how emotionally affected someone could be more than forty years after an incident was proof that no amount of elaborate window dressing can hide the fact that your store is sometimes empty.

The moments missed and the absent days are tough pills to swallow. We all have clocks that are counting backward, and perhaps death and loss are the brightest beacons of that reality.

So until Kurzweil cracks the code to give us a little breathing room, we’re stuck in this particular place and time. I suppose we should try to make the most of it.

Adolescence Interrupted