Losses

It must be difficult for God, listening to our voices come up through his floor of cloud to tell Him what’s been taken away: Lord, I’ve lost my dog, my period, my hair, all my money. What can He say, given we’re so incomplete we can’t stop being surprised by our condition, while He is completeness itself? Or is God more like us, made in His image—shaking His head because He can’t be expected to keep track of which voice goes with what name and address, He being just one God. Either way, we seem to be left here to discover our losses, everything from car keys to larger items we can’t search our pockets for, destined to face them on our own. Even though the dentist gives us music to listen to and the assistant looks down with her lovely smile, it’s still our tooth he yanks out, leaving a soft spot we ponder with our tongue for days. Left to ourselves, we always go over and over what’s missing— tooth, dog, money, self-control, and even losses as troubling as the absence the widower can’t stop reaching for on the other side of his bed a year later. Then one odd afternoon, watching something as common as the way light from the window lingers over a vase on the table, or how the leaves on his backyard tree change colors all at once in a quick wind, he begins to feel a lightness, as if all his loss has led to finding just this. Only God knows where the feeling came from, or maybe God’s not some knower off on a cloud, but there in the eye, which tears up now at the strangest moments, over the smallest things.