That is the essential difficulty of our situation: life goes on, but we do not. We stop. Perhaps the devout are right and some part of us will endure beyond the grave, but either way, existence as we know it—falling in love, grieving, going to the grocery store, splashing in the ocean, driving at night with the music up and the windows down, in every detail good and difficult living out our days here among the egrets and herons and black bears and fleas: all of this ceases absolutely upon our death. That is the very essence of what it means to be mortal, yet it is difficult to fully imagine, let alone accept. Our lives are literally everything to us, and they feel so brimming and momentous while we are living them that it is hard to grasp how fleeting they are compared to the whole of human history, to say nothing of the vast sweep of space and time.
This radical discrepancy between the scale of our own lives and the scale of the rest of existence can leave us feeling two different ways. One of them, akin to the feeling of losing something, is that the universe is dauntingly large and we are terrifyingly insignificant. The other, akin to the feeling of finding, is that the universe is dauntingly large and yet here we are, unimaginably unlikely and therefore precious beyond measure. As with so many other contrasting feelings, most of us will experience both of these eventually. It is easy to feel small and powerless; easy, too, to feel amazed and fortunate to be here.
On the whole, though, I take the side of amazement. I cannot look closely for any length of time at even so simple a thing as a pond and do otherwise. This is what I realized that day at the arboretum: that what serves us best, in the face of inexorable loss, is not our grief or our acquiescence but our attention. For now, at least, the world is ours to notice and to change, and that seems to me sufficient. It is true that loss will ultimately part us from it, but it is also true, as I said earlier, that we have many bindings. Our works of art, our honorable deeds, our acts of kindness and generosity: all of these link us in unseen ways to future generations. So, too, does having children, that ultimate act of conjunction and continuation. Once, when I was nine or ten, I overheard my father joking that having kids didn’t keep you young, but if you were lucky, it made you a little bit eternal. I understand now what he was saying, and I feel the meaning of both his life and my own stretching outward beyond our days, because C. and I are expecting a baby.
For me, the approach of parenthood has made obvious what is true for all of us, whether or not we ever have children: that we are here above all as caretakers, a role as essential as it is temporary. None of us would be here without what came before us, and none of us can know how much and in what ways everything that will come after us depends upon our being here. Walt Whitman, who understood the world’s abundance as well as anyone who ever lived, understood this, too. Leaning on the railing of that Brooklyn ferry, dazzled by the view, he traveled over the waters and the centuries, then looked back and saw himself inseparably connected to everyone else who had undertaken that same journey. Life may exceed us, he knew, but for now it is also made of us. We are the “and,” a part of the continuation of things, the binding between the present and the future.
That is all we have, this moment with the world. It will not last, because nothing lasts. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and no matter how much we find along the way, life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories; the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.
And so I know that what I have with C. is temporary. Someday I will lose her as I lost my father; or I will lose her as my father lost me, swept away at the close of life along with everything. One and then the other of us will die. We will grieve and be mourned and then be mourned no longer; our future child’s grandchildren will scarcely know our names. A hundred years from now, the little spot where we got married will be gone, too—lost, together with much of the rest of the Eastern Shore, to a rising ocean. Whole species that live here will eventually disappear as well, gone the way of the dawn horse, gone the way of the megalodon. Time, in carrying on, will carry almost all of what we know of life away.
Nothing about that is strange or surprising; it is the fundamental, unalterable nature of things. The astonishment is all in the being here. It is the turtle in the pond, the thought in the mind, the falling star, the stranger on Main Street. It is the sunlit green I saw in C.’s eyes again first thing this morning, and the happiness I will feel in an hour or two when I end another day in her arms. To all of this, loss, which seems only to take away, adds its own kind of necessary contribution. No matter what goes missing, the object you need or the person you love, the lessons are always the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.
For my father, whom I lost,
and for C., who found me
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I once heard the late Anthony Bourdain say of my agent, Kimberly Witherspoon, that if she called him up at three in the morning and told him to grab some duct tape, a knife, and a roll of garbage bags and meet her in fifteen minutes on the corner of Ninth Street and Avenue C, he’d be there on time, no questions asked. I could not hope to improve on that description of the trust and loyalty that Kim inspires in people, chiefly by being so loyal and trustworthy herself. She is the finest possible custodian of my career, not to mention wickedly fun, and I am extraordinarily lucky to call her both my agent and my friend. I’m also grateful to all of the other wonderful and helpful people at Inkwell Management, especially Alexis Hurley.
I think I actually have met Hilary Redmon on a street corner in Manhattan in the small hours of the night, because long before she became the editor of this book, she became my friend. It was a great comfort to me, especially during the more difficult moments of working on “Lost,” to know that I could count on her not just for astute editing but for consummate humanity and kindness. She has been an indefatigable champion of this book from the beginning, and I cannot express enough gratitude to her and to all of her colleagues at Random House, including Carrie Neill, Ayelet Durantt, and Ruth Liebmann, whose enthusiasm arrived in my inbox exactly when I needed it.
My editor at The New Yorker, Henry Finder, does not pronounce his surname like “one who finds,” but he nonetheless found me, and I will never stop being grateful. Here as everywhere, my writing benefited tremendously from his generosity, and from the range and perspicacity of his mind. Together with David Remnick—editor extraordinaire and mensch nonpareil—he has given me the best and happiest professional home I could ever hope to have. I am indescribably thankful to them both for their time and their faith, as well as for making room in the magazine for the essay that was the genesis of this book.