My father’s own ability to lose things was inversely correlated to how much those losses troubled him. He misplaced stuff all the time, but he generally greeted each new loss with equanimity, as if his possessions were merely borrowed and their rightful owner had decided to reclaim them. I suppose that a different person with his talent for losing things might have developed a compensatory ability to find them. But my father had developed, instead, a compensatory ability to be cheerfully resigned to their disappearance.
That is an admirable attitude—close, I think, to what the poet Elizabeth Bishop meant by “the art of losing.” The line comes from “One Art,” a poem I have always loved, and one of the most famous reckonings with loss in all of verse. In it, Bishop suggests that minor losses like keys and watches can help prepare us for more serious ones—in her case, two cities, a continent, and the lover to whom the poem is addressed. At first, this claim seems preposterous. It is one thing to lose a wedding ring and something else entirely to lose a wife, and we are rightly reluctant to equate them. Bishop knows this, of course, and in the poem’s final lines, when she contemplates the loss of her lover, the art of losing suddenly shifts from something that “isn’t hard to master” to something that’s “not too hard to master.” The italics are mine, but the concession is hers, and it undermines her overall assertion so much that it is easy to read the poem as ironic—as acknowledging, in the end, that the loss of a loved one is incommensurable with any other.
Yet it is also possible to hear something else in those final lines: a reluctant admission that all of us must somehow learn to live with even our most devastating losses. In that reading, Bishop’s poem is perfectly sincere. It suggests that if we cultivate equilibrium around everyday losses, we might someday be able to muster a similar serenity when we lose more important things. That claim isn’t preposterous at all. Entire spiritual traditions are built on the idea of nonattachment, on the belief that we can learn to face even our gravest losses with acceptance, equilibrium, and grace.
Like many religious ideals, however, this one is largely aspirational for the majority of people. In practice, most of us experience even trivial losses as exasperating. That isn’t just because they always cost us time and sometimes cost us money. We also pay a psychological price for them: any loss, no matter how minor, can cause a small crisis in our relationship with ourselves, with other people, or with the world. Those crises aren’t triggered by the problem of location—of where to find our missing object. They are triggered by the problem of causation: of who or what made it disappear.
Most of the time, the answer is that we did. In the microdrama of loss, we are nearly always both villain and victim. This is unfortunate for our egos, plus various other parts of ourselves. If you know that you were the last person to handle your child’s beloved stuffed orange orangutan but you have no idea what you did with it, you will rightly blame your memory, sometimes worrying not only about its immediate lapse but also about its overall reliability. Yet it is scarcely more comforting to know exactly how you lost something—as when you can’t find your credit card, then realize that you left it at a restaurant over the weekend. At best, such losses leave us feeling irresponsible. At worst, if we have lost something valuable, they can leave us feeling genuinely anguished. For hours or days or sometimes even years, they focus our attention exactly where it failed to focus in the first place: on the moment, among the least forgiving in all of life, when it was still possible to avert what was to come.
In short, losing things routinely makes us feel lousy about ourselves. As a result, we often decline to take responsibility for it, choosing instead to look for someone else to blame. This is how a problem with an object becomes a problem with a person: you swear you left the bill sitting on the table for your husband to mail; your husband swears with equal vehemence that it was never there; soon enough, you have also both lost your tempers. When there are no other convenient suspects around, you may even find yourself accusing your missing object of engineering its own disappearance, alone or in conjunction with various occult forces. That sounds absurd, but almost all of us have leveled allegations like this at some point, because almost all of us have experienced losses that seem to verge on impossible: the sweater we were just wearing that has somehow vanished in a six-hundred-square-foot apartment; the letter we distinctly remember bringing in from the mailbox that has dematerialized by the time we go looking for it in the kitchen. Given enough time spent searching for lost items like these, even the least superstitious among us will start positing various highly improbable culprits: goblins, aliens, wormholes, ether.
It makes sense that we invoke malign or mysterious powers when something goes missing, because it can feel, in such moments, as if the world is not obeying its customary rules. No matter how many times it happens, we experience loss as surprising and perplexing—as a rupture in the way things are meant to work. It feels inconceivable that you can’t find that sweater or that letter, just as it feels inconceivable that your wife of twenty years came home from work one day and asked for a divorce or that your healthy young uncle died last night in his sleep. In the face of losses both large and small, one of our characteristic reactions is a powerful feeling of disbelief.
That feeling is extremely seductive but also extremely misleading. Consider, for instance, a particularly tragic loss from recent years: that of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which, together with the two hundred and thirty-nine people on board, disappeared in March of 2014 with disturbing thoroughness—no distress call, no fire, no explosion, no claims of responsibility, no credible witnesses, and, for more than a year, not a single scrap of debris. At first, the plane was thought to have gone down somewhere in the South China Sea, partway along its intended route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Only many months later, after much wild speculation—including that it had been shot down by the Chinese government or hijacked by Russians and diverted to a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan—did investigators conclude that it had most likely headed south until, finally out of fuel, it crashed somewhere in the remoter reaches of the Indian Ocean.