This kind of temporal reckoning is a common part of grieving. No matter when your loved ones die, there will always be a litany of things they did not live long enough to do: attend your graduation, dance at your wedding, see the house you bought, see the life you built, read the book you wrote, meet your children. Even if those future occurrences are wonderful in themselves, the thought of them after a death can be distressing. Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future. That’s what I realized while talking with my friend—that everything that happened in my life from that point on would be something else my father would not see.
It takes a long time to be done grieving, and even longer to know it. The periodicity of grief is too unreliable and the overall condition too chameleon to track with any certainty. Are you still mourning or just in a lousy mood? Have you crossed that faint boundary that marks the end of bereavement and the beginning of sorrow, an emotion you may feel on and off for the rest of your days? It is very difficult to say, especially because even when the worst has passed, or seems to have passed, there is nothing to prevent its return. Grief has an appalling recidivism rate, and it is common to find yourself back in it long past the point when you thought you were truly, thoroughly done. Still, for almost everyone, it really does fade away eventually. At some point, always retroactively, you look around your life and realize that it is gone.
The same is not true, however, for all the absences left behind by the death of someone you love. These just start to feel different, filled up as they finally are with something other than grief. I still notice, almost daily, all the places where my father is missing. I come upon them in photographs and in books that I’m reading, in the sound of my own sentences and the shape of my thoughts, in my mother and my sister, in my own face in the mirror, in the familiar sight of his wallet—safe now, as it never was with him—in my top dresser drawer. Some of these absences make me grateful, for who my father was and for the excuse to pause and spend a moment thinking of him. Some still have a melancholy, twilight feel. Some, like that chair, are a kind of commonplace memorial, a candle I don’t have to light because it is always bright with him. Collectively, all of them serve to make the world a little less incomplete than it would otherwise be. They are still here, unlike him, and I assume they always will be, as enduring as the love that made them. This is the fundamental paradox of loss: it never disappears.
II.
Found
Here is a true story, very dear to my heart, about an eleven-year-old boy named Billy who was almost hit by a falling star. It happened one Sunday evening, in the summertime. After church, he sat down to lunch with his parents, and after that, he walked across a pasture and a cornfield to the Johnson farm. Roger Johnson was Billy’s age, and for the two of them, summer Sundays were themselves a kind of field—broad and open, no adults watching over them, no school day looming up in front of them, no boundary to the day but the natural one of darkness. They played marbles; they climbed trees; they held corncob battles, using as ammunition the ones that always littered the ground. When those battles escalated, they scavenged in sheds and scrap piles, nailed a board between two saplings, stretched a bicycle tube across it, and declared the contraption a rocket launcher. Only when the birds grew raucous and the sky began to empty of light did Billy say his goodbyes and head home to do the milking.
The world is enormous in childhood. Even a modest suburban backyard contains its secret dangers and kingdoms; in the place Billy grew up, where a hundred acres regularly separated one neighbor from another, a walk home could span epochs and civilizations. The only thing larger than the land was the sky, obliged as it was to fill up all the space that the ground, which stretched almost perfectly flat from horizon to horizon, did not. Some days, he and Roger, sent to take the cows across the road, would lie down in the pasture with them and watch the clouds change overhead: a solitary dragon unfurling its tail, a lion leaning back on its haunches, a dark gray expanse like the ocean in bad weather, moving fast but furrowed as neatly as new plowing. Some nights, after his chores were done, Billy would sit alone behind the barn and watch the stars come out, one by one at first, and then in groups, and then in vast crowds, ten million strangers amassing with their torches in some other field incomprehensibly far away.
On this night, though, the sky was just starting to darken at its distant edge and the first stars were barely visible when Billy, who was still making his way home, turned around. In later years, he could never say exactly what made him do so—maybe just a whim, the impulse to walk backward for a while, as kids will do, or maybe a movement on the edge of his vision, or maybe a noise he didn’t recognize. You can’t hear a nearby meteorite while it is falling, any more than you can hear an apple falling from a tree. You can, however, hear the earth reacting to its descent from on high. So intense is the electromagnetic energy generated by meteorites that when it is absorbed by other objects—trees, fence posts, eyeglasses, hair—they heat up and expand, producing all kinds of strange sounds. Witnesses to meteorite falls have described hearing whistling, crackling, rumbling, hissing, sizzling, and a boom like the report of a cannon. Because that intense energy can also produce changes in air pressure, some physicists and planetary scientists believe that even people who hear nothing can sometimes “sense” a meteorite falling.
Whatever made him do it, when Billy turned around, something was hurtling downward out of the sky. It was small and dark and heading straight for him; alarmed, he turned and ran. When he finally stopped and looked again, the something was gone. He retraced his steps and tried to find it, but the longer he looked, the less light there was to see by, until finally he gave up and walked the rest of the way home through the gathering darkness. The next day, though, he went out again and, although he didn’t know what he was looking for until he spotted it—and then he knew it right away: starkly out of place in the ordinary soil, smooth and exceptionally heavy in his two hands, thrilling as the infinite universe out of which it had fallen—he found it.
* * *
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What an astonishing thing it is to find something. Children, who excel at it—chiefly because the world is still so new to them that they can’t help but notice it—understand this, and automatically delight in it. You may hear a joyful shout of “Mom, come look what I found!” even when the thing in question is a dead banana slug on the front step. And they are right to feel this way. Finding is usually rewarding and sometimes exhilarating: a reunion with something old or an encounter with something new, a happy meeting between ourselves and some previously missing or mysterious bit of the cosmos.
A list of such meetings could fill volumes far larger than this one, because finding, like losing, is an enormous category, bursting with seemingly unrelated contents, from gold doubloons to God. We can find things like pencils in couch cushions and things like new planets in distant solar systems and things that aren’t things at all: inner peace, old elementary school classmates, the solution to a problem. We can find things that were never missing, except from our own lives (as when we find a new job or a hole-in-the-wall barbecue joint), and we can find things so deeply hidden that almost no one else thought to look for them (as when we find glial cells or quarks).